Todd Haynes

Directing · Born 1961-01-02 in Los Angeles, California, USA

Biography

Todd Haynes (/heɪnz/; born January 2, 1961; Los Angeles) is an American filmmaker. His films span four decades with themes examining the personalities of well-known musicians, dysfunctional and dystopian societies, and blurred gender roles. Haynes first gained public attention with his controversial short film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987), which chronicles singer Karen Carpenter's life and death, using Barbie dolls as actors. Superstar became a cult classic. Haynes's feature directorial debut, Poison (1991), a provocative exploration of AIDS-era queer perceptions and subversions, established him as a figure of a new transgressive cinema. Poison won the Sundance Film Festival's Grand Jury Prize and is regarded as a seminal work of New Queer Cinema. Haynes received further…

Filmography

• Douglas Sirk – Hope as in Despair as Self
• Xavier Dolan: Bound to Impossible as Self
• At the Video Store as Self
• He Was Once as Randy
• Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story as Todd Donovan
• Fabulous! The Story of Queer Cinema as Self
• Great Directors as Self
• Assassins: A Film Concerning Rimbaud
• At Sundance as Self
• Swoon as Phrenology Head

TV

• Off Script with The Hollywood Reporter as Self
• SexTV