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Award-winning writer-director crafting whimsical stories about unlikely heroes in English, French, and Spanish - based between Paris, NYC and LA.
In February 2023, her psychological horror fantasy short, THE RINGMASTER, premiered at Paris International Film Festival where Maya won the BEST DIRECTOR Award, launching the pitch of the feature version. In 2021, she won the EMERGING DIRECTOR AWARD at LA Diversity Film Festival and was nominated for BEST DIRECTOR. Her commercial “Give the Gift of Joy” won an Emmy for Best Commercial and “Giveaway” the Gold Award at the American Advertising Awards.
In 2020, she wrote and directed a dark fantasy comedy short, FREEZE, starring Chris Parnell, Adrian Grenier, Nora Zehetner, Kel Mitchell and Mindy Sterling, which took home BEST SHORT and BEST ACTRESS at its premiere at SeriesFest and went on to play 45 festivals. In 2021, it was one of few shorts distributed by Oscilloscope and Premium Films for sales to HBO, ARGO and other European outlets.
In 2018, the Directors Guild of America awarded Maya the Commercial Directors Diversity Program Fellowship, and her commercial, “History”, was named Best New Work of 2018 by Shoot Mag, and she received their Badge of Honor for Rising Female Filmmaker. Maya has a Masters in Filmmaking from Columbia University in New York, and double Bachelor of Arts Summa Cum Laude in International Studies and French from Institut Catholique de Paris and University of California, Santa Barbara.