Directory Profile

Professor Natasha Maidoff's work is held in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and in the Feminist Art Base at the Brooklyn Museum. Her award-winning films have toured internationally, including screenings at the Guggenheim and Pecci Museums. She has received artist residencies to the Wexner Center for the Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo.  

Before the pandemic, Maidoff spent four years teaching as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Ohio University’s School of Film. While living in southeast Ohio, Maidoff became aware of the devastation the opiate epidemic was wreaking on the foothills of Appalachia. She met two young women surviving with opiate-addicted parents.  Their story inspired her most recent film, THE FULLEST DAY OF SUMMER and informed her novel and pilot OPIATE ORPHANS. 

Maidoff’s other current project, ILLEGITIMATE, is based on the true story of Cassie Chadwick who embezzled over a million dollars by claiming she was the daughter of Andrew Carnegie in the early 1900s and outmaneuvering the male bankers who thought they were getting the better deal. 

Maidoff earned a B.A. in Creative Writing from Oberlin College and an M.F.A. in Screenwriting from UCLA’s School of Film, Theater and Television where she won the Director’s Spotlight Award. Maidoff was also the recipient of a Mellon Grant for an environmentally themed multi-media performance art piece called Junkyard Jukebox.