Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre

Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre (born 1978 Murdochville, Quebec) is a Montreal-based filmmaker most notable for her animated documentary films.

After completing a BFA with honours in animation and an MFA in film production at Concordia University, she attended a Berlinale Talent Campus at the Berlin Film Festival in 2004, the Talent Lab at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2007, and participated in a three-month residency in Japan in Sapporo in 2009.Her films include Post-Partum, McLaren's Negatives, Passages, The Sapporo Project, Femelles, Flocons and Jutra. McLaren's Negatives, her first animated documentary, was shown in over 150 film festivals and received approximately 20 awards, including the Jutra Award for best animated film. She first became familiar with McLaren's work while studying at Concordia. Passages recounts the difficulties she had giving birth to her first child at Montreal's Hôpital Saint-Luc.In 2004, Saint-Pierre founded MJSTP Films, her animation and documentary production company. There is a chapter devoted to her work in the 2010 book Animated Realism: A Behind The Scenes Look at the Animated Documentary Genre, published by Focal Press.In 2009, she was selected as the international artist in residency for the S-AIR Inter-cross Creative Center in Sapporo, Japan. In January 2013, her work was featured in a retrospective at the Cinémathèque québécoise, where she also taught master classes.In 2014, the National Film Board of Canada released Jutra, her animated documentary portrait on Quebec filmmaker Claude Jutra that was selected for the Director's Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival. The film won the Canadian Screen Award for best short documentary as well as the Jutra Award for best short animated film. Saint-Pierre also released the same year the short film Flocons to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Norman McLaren. In 2016, she directed the short film Oscar based on the life and work of jazz pianist Oscar Peterson.

She produced Co Hoedeman's animated film The Blue Marble as well as The Delian Mode by Kara Blake. She also served as artistic director and animator on Patricio Henríquez's feature documentary Uyghurs: Prisoners of the Absurd (Ouïghours, prisonniers de l'absurde). She is currently a PhD. student at Université du Québec à Montréal in the program Études et Pratiques des Arts.