Mary Harron was born on January 12, 1953 in Bracebridge, Ontario, Canada. She is a Canadian filmmaker and screenwriter. She gained recognition for her role in writing and directing several independent films, including I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), American Psycho (2000), and The Notorious Bettie Page (2005). She co-wrote American Psycho and The Notorious Bettie Page with Guinevere Turner. Although Harron has denied this title, she has been thought to be a feminist filmmaker due to her film on lesbian feminist Valerie Solanas, in I Shot Andy Warhol, and a queer story-line within her teenage Gothic horror, The Moth Diaries (2011). Harron grew up with a family that was entrenched in the world of film and theater. She is the daughter of Gloria Fisher and Don Harron, a Canadian actor, comedian, author, and director. Harron spent her early life residing between Toronto and Los Angeles. Harron's first stepmother, Virginia Leith, was discovered by Stanley Kubrick and acted in his first film, Fear and Desire. Leith's brief acting career partly inspired Harron's interest in making The Notorious Bettie Page. Harron's stepfather is the novelist Stephen Vizinczey best known for his internationally successful book In Praise of Older Women. Harron's second stepmother is the Canadian singer Catherine McKinnon. Harron's sister, Kelley Harron, is an actor and producer. Harron moved to England when she was thirteen and later attended St Anne's College, Oxford University, where she received a Bachelors in English. While in England, she dated Tony Blair, later the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and Chris Huhne, another Oxford student who later became a prominent politician. She then moved to New York City and was part of its 1970s punk scene. Harron has the title of Canadian female director, though she did not spend much of her life in Canada. She has said it is not a defining characteristic that influences her directorial choices. She feels that she has a different perspective as a Canadian but her work is not directly influenced or through a Canadian lens. In New York, Harron helped start and write for Punk magazine as a music journalist; she was the first journalist to interview the Sex Pistols for an American publication. She grew up in the early punk scene of America. She found the culture easy for her to fit into and was constantly evolving and spreading into new demographics. During the 1980s, she was a drama critic for The Observer in London for a time, as well as working as a music critic for The Guardian and the New Statesman. In the late 1980s, Harron participated and began her film career writing and directing BBC Documentaries. During the 1990s, Harron moved back to New York where she worked as a producer for PBS's Edge, a program dedicated to exploring American pop culture. It was at this time that Harron became interested in the life of Valerie Solanas, the woman who attempted to kill Andy Warhol. Harron suggested making a documentary about Solanas to her producers, who in turn encouraged her to develop the project into what would be her first feature film. Harron says she owes her success with her first film to Andy who helped to sell the controversial focus on the attempted murderess, Solanas. The Birds Eye View film festival is a celebration of female filmmakers, a response to the fact that women still make up only 6% of all film directors and 12% of screenwriters. Harron is one of the industry's few high-profile female directors and certainly one of its most interesting figures from a feminist perspective, having built films around the characters of a volatile man-hater (I Shot Andy Warhol), a volatile woman-hater (American Psycho), and an infamous 1950s glamour model who ditched bondage portraits in favor of Christianity (The Notorious Bettie Page). Harron talled about sexism in the industry, she says that what she has witnessed has been "very subtle. People ask why there are so few women directors and it's really hard to explain. It's a lot of little things that make it difficult to survive. It's not so true in independent film, but in television, people are kind of waiting for you to fail. Not in a malicious way, but I've heard people say, 'We've tried a woman director, it just didn't work out.' I think there's still an element of that, but I'm optimistic in my way. I don't think women should let that determine their whole career or worry about it too much." Harron feels that women-only events such as Birds Eye View are still important, and is looking forward to attending as much as participating. "It's my best chance to see movies, day to day," She also said, "has a purpose to it, as it's so hard for a lot of films to get distribution, and I like their choice of topics they're doing something about the femme fatale, they're showing some silent films, which I love. It's not at all what you might expect."

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