Jillian Schlesinger was born in Ossining, New York and moved to Santa Cruz, California as a child. She has an undergraduate degree from Brown University, where she studied creative writing and linguistic anthropology. She is an American filmmaker. She is known for her award-winning documentary Maidentrip about Laura Dekker, the youngest person ever to sail around the world alone. In 2009, Schlesinger read a New York Times op-ed about a young Dutch woman named Laura Dekker with intentions to sail around the world alone at the age of 14. The story captured her attention and she made an effort to get in touch with Dekker, who was notably media-shy at the time. Dekker responded positively to the idea of a collaboration with the first-time director and the two set off on the adventure of making a documentary together. Working with an all-women crew, Schlesinger met Dekker 10 times over the course of the 17-month voyage around the world, including a three-week passage across the Pacific Ocean on another sailboat. After Dekker successfully completed her circumnavigation in January 2012 at the age of 16, it took a year to complete the film, with Dekker visiting New York to work with Schlesinger and editor Penelope Falk. Maidentrip had its world premiere at SXSW Film Festival in March 2013 where it won the Visions Audience Award. The film was subsequently acquired and released by First Run Features. The film is a really heroic story for young women or anyone to admire. She said she decided to make this film because “I was really struck by the details of Laura’s personal story and the fact that her voice didn’t seem to be represented at all in the very sensational media conversation around her, so I reached out to her. I spent a couple months developing a pretty elaborate proposal that I thought would connect with a 14-year-old girl. I had not made a film before, so I wanted the proposal to give a visual and impressionistic sense of what the film would be about and what the process and style would be, so it had things like mood boards and different illustrations of various concepts and a pretty detailed personal letter about my interest in the story. The concept that I was considering for the film was this collaborative project that would allow Laura to tell her own story from her point of view in a way that hadn’t really been possible for her as this whole thing was happening with the Dutch government. She responded really quickly and said I’ve got a zillion people pitching various projects, but this actually sounds really cool.”

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