Anja Marquardt

Anja Marquardt is a German film director who won two major international film awards for her first feature film She's Lost Control. Marquardt was previously known for her screen-writing and directing of critically acclaimed short films. Her first full-length movie explored the emotional journey of a young female student who works as a sexual surrogate and falls in love with an unusually recalcitrant client. Certain aspects of Marquardt’s work have been contrasted to Ben Lewin's similarly themed feature film The Sessions that uses a diametrically opposite approach to the topic. Marquardt stated that she intended "not to write a love story, but an anti-love story."

A child of German parents, Marquardt was born and raised in the divided city of Berlin, Germany. After completing her secondary school education, she enrolled in the interdisciplinary "Communication in Social and Economic Contexts" program at the Berlin University of the Arts. Marquardt started traveling extensively and lived for brief periods in Arizona, Granada, Strasbourg, and Laos.

After graduating from the University of the Arts in Berlin, Marquardt spent a number of years working in film project development and production in Germany. Subsequently she worked in France as a commissioning Fiction editor for the Franco-German TV network ARTE. In 2007, Marquardt was accepted as a Dean's Fellow in the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University to pursue graduate studies in the Master of Fine Arts program. She led and collaborated on several short film projects as a writer, producer and director as well as in ancillary roles. Her short film "Thanksgiving", one of her earliest works, won the "best student short award" at the Cinequest Film Festival in 2009 and "best short film" at the 92YTribeca Showcase in 2010. A short documentary "Our Lady of Mercy" premiered in a screening at the Cannes Film Festival in 2009. Marquardt graduated from New York University with a MFA degree in 2013.

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