“With 'Poison,' I'm sure some people just hated the movie, but it also got caught up into a debate about arts funding because it was a film that received a National Endowment for the Arts Public Grant, and it won the prize at the Sundance Film Festival.”

American film director, screenwriter, and producer

Todd Haynes is an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. Working across four decades, he is known for films that engage melodrama, historical pastiche, and queer cinema. His work often examines the emotional and psychological effects of social repression, especially around sexuality, identity, illness, and conformity. He is also associated with the New Queer Cinema movement of the early 1990s, and is noted for reworking classical Hollywood forms, including the woman’s picture and the biopic, to explore marginalized experience and unspoken desire.