Kimberly Ane Peirce[2] (born September 8, 1967) is an American filmmaker, best known for her debut feature film, Boys Don't Cry (1999), which won Hilary Swank her first Academy Award for Best Actress.

[9] While at Columbia working on an idea for her thesis film about a female soldier in drag during the American Civil War,[10] Peirce read a Village Voice article[11] about the life and death of Brandon Teena, a transgender man from Nebraska who was brutally raped and murdered when his gender history was discovered.

The subsequent short film she made for her thesis in 1995 was nominated by Columbia faculty for a Princess Grace Award, and received an Astrea Production Grant.

In order to fund the writing and development of the feature, Peirce worked as a paralegal on the midnight shift, as a 35mm film projectionist and received a New York Foundation for the Arts grant.

[14][15] In 2005, inspired by the real-life stories of American soldiers, including her own brother, fighting in Iraq and coming home, Peirce began work on Stop-Loss.

[17][18] In association with the film, Peirce created a website called SoundOff and gave soldiers and their families cameras to record and share their stories and opinions.

On February 16, 2011, it was announced that Peirce would direct the crime thriller The Knife,[24] about two men from opposite sides of the law who must overcome their mistrust of one another and risk their lives in order to infiltrate the organization of a ruthless gang leader threatening to spread armed violence across Los Angeles and the urban centers of America.

[26] Peirce co-wrote the script for Silent Star, a murder mystery about the 1922 death of Hollywood director William Desmond Taylor and the scandals that nearly destroyed the film industry.

[27] Peirce is a founding member of ReFrame, an industry-wide effort to end discrimination against women and people of color in Hollywood as well as the head of the Diversity Committee for Directors for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

She received the GLAAD Media, Lambda Legal Defense, People for the American Way, Lesbian Anti-Violence Project and the 2013 OUTFEST Career Achievement Awards.