Katherine Dieckmann on AllMovie

Writer, director, and occasional editor Katherine Dieckmann emerged as a creative force in filmmaking during the late '90s, and thereafter helmed a series of offbeat and finely observed character-driven seriocomedies on relatively low budgets, for production outfits such as Magnolia Pictures and Killer Films. In so doing, she rode the American "indie" filmmaking boom initially catalyzed by directors such as Ed Burns (to whom her work earned frequent comparisons in the press) and Paul Thomas Anderson.

Dieckmann first began to attract attention for her 1999 melodrama A Good Baby, starring Henry Thomas, Cara Seymour, and David Strathairn. The film drew heavy and unanimous critical praise for its originality and bravura, which seemed to foreshadow prolific output for Dieckmann; unfortunately, for several years, this was not the case, and aside from directing occasional R.E.M. videos, she maintained a relatively low profile. She next emerged in 2006 with the feature Diggers -- a project that originated not with her, but with a script by actor Ken Marino (who also starred) about a group of clam diggers on Long Island, circa 1976. Shot and edited in a rapid 21 days, this feature also netted an extremely enthusiastic response from the public and press, and ran at both the South by Southwest Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival. A third outing, the slice-of-life dramedy Motherhood (2008), stars Uma Thurman as a single mother undergoing preparations for her daughter's sixth birthday while attempting to juggle the challenges of life in a big city.