Claudia Weill

Made amateur films while a Radcliffe student and, after graduating in 1969, studied painting with Oskar Kokoschka and still photography at Yale with Walker Evans. Weill engineered a number of documentary shorts and experimental films and gained acclaim for her feature-length documentary, "The Other Half of the Sky: A China Memoir" (1975), made in collaboration with Shirley MacLaine. She directed her attentions toward the mainstream with two likeable but uneven dramas, "Girlfriends" (1978) and "It's My Turn" (1980), centering on the plight of contemporary women. Weill has reached her widest audience to date as director of the popular TV series, "thirtysomething."