Mirta Desir is a DGA-honored writer-director of intimate dramas about girls, mothers, and the borders — real and imagined — they cross to survive.
Her films move between the literal and the spiritual. In JEAN & I, a ten-year-old survivor of the Haiti earthquake begins to unravel the strangeness of her new American family. In her debut feature ANGIE, currently in post-production, a young girl strikes a bargain with the spirits. And in MIGRANT MOTHERS, a documentary also in post, she follows women crossing the Darién Gap — the most dangerous jungle in the world — with their children in their arms.
JEAN & I won the 2024–25 DGA Student Film Award Grand Prize (East Coast). ANGIE was awarded the Lynn Shelton Grant through Northwest Film Forum. Mirta is a 2025 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Screenwriting and a recipient of the Penguin Random House / We Need Diverse Books Publishing Fellowship for her manuscript SAVING JUDE.
She holds an MFA in Film Directing from the Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema, a JD from Loyola University New Orleans, and a BA/BS from Syracuse University. She lives and works in Brooklyn.