Karyn Kusama

Karyn Kiyoko Kusama (born March 21, 1968) is an American film and television director.

She made her feature film debut with the 2000 film Girlfight, which she wrote and directed, for which she won the Award of the Youth at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature.

She went on to direct the 2005 sci-fi action film Æon Flux, based on Peter Chung's animated series of the same name, and the 2009 cult horror comedy Jennifer's Body. She has recently worked as a television director.

In 2017 she directed a segment in the film XX, an all-female horror anthology. Her latest film is the 2018 crime thriller Destroyer, starring Nicole Kidman.

Kusama was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the daughter of Haruo Kusama, a Japanese child psychiatrist and Susan McGuire, an Midwestern educational psychiatrist. She graduated from Ladue Horton Watkins High School in St. Louis, and in 1990, she earned a BFA in Film & TV from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.