Marielle Heller

Something of a renaissance woman, Marielle Heller essayed multiple roles in Hollywood, and made her mark both in front of and behind the camera. A California native, Heller was born in 1979. She initially built a career as an actress, with guest spots on the situation comedies "Spin City" (ABC 1996-2002) and "Single Dads" (Foc 2009). In the years that followed, Heller transitioned to the big screen, with a small role opposite Kristen Wiig and Will Forte in the action comedy "MacGruber" (2010) and another supporting turn in the Liam Neeson crime drama "A Walk Among the Tombstones" (2014).

Meanwhile, Heller also trained as a screenwriter and director at the Sundance Film Festival workshops; she was selected as both a 2012 Sundance Screenwriting Fellow and a 2012 Sundance Directing Fellow, and received two other prestigious honors, the Maryland Film Festival Fellowship and the Lynn Auerbach Screenwriting Fellowship. Scripted pilots for ABC and 20th Century Fox followed, as did Heller's debut feature as a writer and director. This film, the 2015 drama "The Diary of a Teenage Girl," was adapted by Heller from Phoebe Gloeckner's 2002 novel of the same title. Co-starring Kristen Wiig and Alexander Skarsgård, it tells the story of a teenage artist in 1970s San Francisco who has an affair with her mother's beau.