Maria Dizzia

The precision of the New York stage

Maria Dizzia doesn't have the glitzy red carpet look, but she is one of those actresses who keep New York's industry running. In 2010, she earned a Tony nomination for In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play). That role as Mrs. Daldry pulled her out of purely stage work and put her on the radar of television casting directors.

It was a change of scale.

She studied at Cornell University and then earned a master's in Fine Arts at UC San Diego. That academic training shows in the way she approaches scripts, as she tends to dissect texts with almost surgical precision. Before moving into film, she spent years in experimental theater and Off-Broadway productions that barely covered the bills.

The hidden side of Litchfield

Mainstream audiences first recognized her in 2013 thanks to Orange Is the New Black. She played Polly Harper, the protagonist's best friend who ends up having an affair with her husband while she's in prison. It was a character who was hard to like, and it allowed her to show she could sustain tension in a big-budget series.

But Dizzia handles viewer discomfort very well.

In independent film, she has worked with figures like Sean Durkin and Noah Baumbach. In Martha Marcy May Marlene, released in 2011, she shared the screen with Elizabeth Olsen in a cult drama that won at Sundance. She wasn't after the spotlight but instead brought real weight to key scenes through silences and sidelong glances.

Behind the camera in France

During 2022, she appeared in the series The Staircase and also in The First Lady. In the latter, she played Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, Franklin D. Roosevelt's lover. These supporting roles demand a lot of restraint so they don't clash with the leading stars, and she has made that discretion her greatest professional tool.

So she decided to move into directing.

In 2024, she shot her feature directorial debut, Funny Birds, in Belgium and France. The film stars Catherine Deneuve and Andrea Riseborough in the lead roles. It's a production that explores the relationships among three generations of women on a chicken farm in the French countryside.

European critics are watching her closely.

She co-wrote the script with Laura Piani, and the project entered post-production toward the end of that same year. The film had an estimated budget of 5 million euros and was shot mostly on location near Bordeaux.