Golden Globe Award for Best Director

The Golden Globe Award for Best Director – Motion Picture is presented out at the annual Golden Globe Awards ceremony conducted by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), a consortium of journalists and photographers covering the US entertainment industry for publications mainly in non-US media markets. This accolade is bestowed to recognize and honor excellence of a film director in directing a motion picture and is considered a symbol of recognition and prestige in the world of cinema.

The Best Director – Motion Picture award was introduced as one of the six original categories of the Golden Globe Awards ceremony at the time of the latter’s inception by the Hollywood Foreign Correspondent Association (HFCA), the predecessor of HFPA. Henry King became the first recipient of the Golden Globe Award for Best Director at the 1944 held 1st Golden Globe Awards ceremony. Legendary filmmaker Elia Kazan holds the record for most competitive wins in this category, winning all four of his nominations. He is followed by six luminaries, namely Clint Eastwood, David Lean, Miloš Forman, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Oliver Stone, each of whom bagged three Best Director awards. Among them Spielberg, considered a prominent figure of the New Hollywood era and the highest grossing film director of all time, holds the record of garnering most nominations with fourteen. Other multiple winners include James Cameron, Fred Zinnemann, Billy Wilder, Ang Lee, Francis Ford Coppola, Alfonso Cuarón, John Huston, William Friedkin and Sam Mendes, all of whom earned two awards each.

American singer, actress and filmmaker Barbra Streisand became the first woman in the history of the Golden Globes to win the award for Best Director, receiving it for the American romantic musical drama Yentl (1983). She held the position of being the only woman to achieve such feat for 37 years before Chinese-born filmmaker Chloé Zhao won in the category for the American drama Nomadland (2020), making the latter the second woman and the first woman of Asian descent to win the award. New Zealand filmmaker Jane Campion became the third woman to take home the Best Director award, winning it for the revisionist Western psychological drama The Power of the Dog (2021).

The award for Best Director – Motion Picture celebrates the vision, craftsmanship and dedication of a film director who through the power of storytelling thrives in captivating the audience and leaving a profound impact both on the cinephiles and on the world of cinema inspiring and setting trends for future film directors and students of the art.

List Of Winners - Best Director Motion Picture Golden Globes