Maya Deren (1917–1961) · Public domain

An avant-garde filmmaker whose 1943 short Meshes of the Afternoon, made with her husband Alexander Hammid, became one of the most influential works in American experimental cinema, using jump cuts, superimposition, and slow motion to dissolve the boundary between dream and waking life. She wrote, produced, directed, and photographed most of her later films largely on her own, drawing on dance, ethnography, and her study of Haitian Vodou to build a body of work that treated film as a way of creating an experience rather than telling a story.