director of the film ‘Cooking Up Democracy’
Writer, director, producer. Born in Mönchengladbach, Germany, in 1954, she completed a PhD in literature at Marburg in 1984. She began working with video in 1976 and founded Hyena Films with Elfi Mikesch in 1984. Her award-winning feature and documentary films have shaped Queer Cinema for over 40 years now. The love story Seduction: The Cruel Woman, the sex melodrama Virgin Machine and the comedy My Father is Coming were followed by a series of documentaries including the multi-award-winning trans-futuristic Gendernauts. Treut’s films have been widely shown at film festivals around the world and enjoyed a number of retrospectives. In 2017, she received the Teddy Award for her lifetime achievement. Other lifetime achievements from queer film festivals followed in Torino, Tel Aviv, Madrid, Palermo and Zurich. Most recently Treut has been awarded the Helmut-Käutner-Preis. She has also taught at universities in California, Illinois, Virginia, Indiana and New York and, from 2018 to 2023, has been Deputy Professor of Media at the University of Hildesheim.
