American filmmaker Gregg Araki was BOTD in 1959. Born in Los Angeles, California, to a Japanese-American family, he studied filmmaking at the University of Southern California. He released two low-budget feature films in the late 1980s, winning critical acclaim for 1992’s The Living End, a road movie about gay lovers who kill a homophobic policeman and go on the road (described by many critics as “the gay Thelma and Louise“). His next movies Totally Fucked Up”, The Doom Generation and Nowhere, a grim trilogy about omnisexual teen angst, drew mixed critical responses, but established him as a leading figure in the New Queer Cinema movement. He is best known for his 2004 film Mysterious Skin, based on Scott Heim’s novel about two adolescent boys dealing in radically different ways with experiences of child sexual abuse. Featuring star-making performances by Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Brady Corbet, the film premiered at the Venice Film Festival to critical success, bringing Araki’s work to a wider audience. His 2010 film Kaboom premiered at the Cannes Festival, where it won the first Queer Palm award for LGBTQ film. He has also directed episodes of TV drama American Crime, and Ryan Murphy‘s true crime series Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. His own TV series Now Apocalypse premiered in 2019 but was cancelled after its first season. Araki has had relationships with men and women, and identifies primarily as gay. His current relationship status is unknown.