American playwright, director and screenwriter Phyllis Nagy was BOTD in 1962. Born in New York City, she studied at New York University, moving to England in 1992, where she became writer-in-residence at London’s Royal Court Theatre under the direction of Stephen Daldry. Her first full-length play Weldon Rising was produced in London in 1992, followed by Girl Bar, Disappeared, Entering Queens and Butterfly Kiss. She became friends with writer Patricia Highsmith in the 1990s, while working on a theatrical adaptation of The Talented Mr Ripley. In between gallons of Scotch whiskey, Highsmith later encouraged Nagy to adapt her 1952 lesbian-themed novel The Price of Salt for the screen. Nagy rose to wider public attention as the writer-director of 2006 TV film Mrs Harris, starring Annette Bening and Ben Kingsley, earning Emmy Award nominations for her writing and direction. In 2014, her long-gestating screenplay of The Price of Salt, a smouldering love story about a young photographer who falls in love with a glamorous married woman, was made into the film Carol by Todd Haynes, starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara. Premiering at the Cannes Festival, where Mara shared the best actress prize, it became one of the year’s most critically revered films, and hailed as a breakthrough for lesbian representation in cinema. Nagy’s screenplay won a number of industry prizes, including the New York Critics Circle Award, and earned an Oscar nomination. In 2016, the British Film Institute named Carol the best LGBT film of all time. Nagy later directed the feature film Call Jane, a drama about a 1960s underground network of abortion activists. The film premiered at the 2022 Sundance Festival to critical praise, earning unexpected attention when the United States Supreme Court overturned the Roe v Wade case later that year, resulting in many American states restricting or banning abortion. Openly lesbian since forever, Nagy lives in Los Angeles; her current relationship status is unknown.