Josephine Decker is a filmmaker and performer whose work delves into women’s interiority, bending the space between imagination and reality.  Her feature film Madeline’s Madelinethrusts the audience into the ever-shifting first-person perspective of her main character. Madeline’s Madeline, scripted through a devised process with ten actors, played Sundance, Berlinale and scores of festivals worldwide, was hailed as a “mind-scrambling masterpiece” (Indiewire) and was nominated for Best Picture at IFP’s Gotham Awards and for two Independent Spirit Awards. Said to be ushering in a “new grammar of narrative” by The New Yorker, Josephine’s other feature films have received many accolades: Shirley (starring Elisabeth Moss) won Sundance’s U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Auteur Filmmaking, The Sky Is Everywhere (A24/Apple) was a New York Times Critic’s Pick, and her first two features premiered together at Berlinale 2014 and went on to play scores of festival worldwide, winning awards and garnering a retrospective at the Torino Film Festival. Her most recent feature Chasing Summer premiered at Sundance 2026, and Variety's Peter Debruge noted that the film "shows all the polish and soul of those glossy studio comedies that result when Judd Apatow picks a comedian and builds an entire project around them."  The comedy feature also played SXSW 2026, as did a short Josephine directed.

Josephine wrote and directed a play with Pig Iron Theatre Company in Philadelphia in 2022, which explored complex decisions around pregnancy through a dream lens.  Josephine performed from 2008 - 2015 with the Main Squeeze Orchestra, an all-female accordion orchestra in New York City, and she currently performs as part of a clown ensemble in Los Angeles led by Amrita Dhaliwal.  

Since 2022, she has been making a documentary in collaboration with teen mothers in Dallas, Texas.  Dallas offers limited access to contraception and health insurance and has the highest repeat teen pregnancy rate in the country.  The teen mothers Josephine works with improvise, write and act in short films that create the backbone of the doc.