Allison Anders (born November 16, 1954) is an American film and television director. Anders has directed several independent films, on which she frequently collaborates with fellow UCLA film school graduate Kurt Voss.
According to an article in Creative Screenwriter Magazine: "Raised in rural Kentucky, Anders spent her teens hitchhiking across the country, resulting in a series of adventures that often ended in jails and foster homes—experiences she credits with giving her raw inspiration for her cinematic portraits of rural Americans." At eighteen, she moved to England, then returned to Los Angeles to raise her first child. She attended the UCLA School of Theater Film and Television and was granted a Nicholls Fellowship by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Her screenplay "Lost Highway" (unrelated to the David Lynch film of the same title) also earned her a Samuel Goldwyn Writing Award.
Her first film effort was the punk music-heavy Border Radio, which was nominated for Best Feature of 1989 by the Independent Feature Project. Anders followed up with her popular 1992 film Gas Food Lodging, for which she won a New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best New Director, and for which actress Fairuza Balk won an Independent Spirit Award. Her next film for Cineville was Mi Vida Loca (My Crazy Life), about girl gangs in Los Angeles; it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1993, and saw wide release in 1994.
In 1995, she was awarded a "genius grant" by the MacArthur Foundation, although the 1995 collaborative film Four Rooms in which she participated in was largely panned by critics. In 1996, she won more acclaim with Grace of My Heart, the story of a backroom songwriter (Illeana Douglas) who tires of making other people famous.
In the late 1980s, Anders had become friends with some members of the pop group Duran Duran, and frequently inserted small references to the band in her films (character names, posters on walls, and so on). In 1999, after bassist John Taylor had left Duran Duran and was beginning to launch an acting career, she wrote the film Sugar Town about the Los Angeles film and music industry, which starred several musical friends of hers, including Taylor, X singer John Doe, Spandau Ballet bassist Martin Kemp, and singer/actor Michael Des Barres.
As of 2006, the 2001 film Things Behind the Sun, dealing with the long-term aftermath of a rape, is her most recent film.
Anders began directing shows for broadcast and cable television in 1999, including several episodes in the second season of Sex and the City, as well as episodes of Grosse Pointe and Cold Case.
