Isabel Coixet is a highly prolific and influential Spanish film director, writer, and producer, known for her distinctive visual style and themes of emotions and existential conflict. Born in Sant Adrià de Besòs near Barcelona in 1960, she started filming when she was given an 8 mm camera on the occasion of her First Communion.
After obtaining a BA degree in history at Barcelona University, where she majored in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history, she started her career in advertising before making her feature film debut in 1988, Demasiado Viejo Para Morir Joven (Too Old to Die Young).
In 1996, she travelled to the United States to shoot her first English-language feature film, Things I Never Told Yo,u and in 1998 she shot — for the first time in Spain and in Spanish — the historical adventure A los que aman. Two years later she founded her own production company, with which she produced her most acclaimed film to date, Mi vida sin mí (My Life Without Me), with Sarah Polley as Ann, a young mother who decides to hide from her family that she has terminal cancer. She worked with Polly as her lead actress in The Secret Life of Words (2005) and has also worked multiple times with Juliette Binoche, Patricia Clarkson, and Rinko Kikuchi. Her film Elegy premiered at Berlin Film Festival in 2008 and Map of the Sounds of Tokyo was in an official selection of the Cannes Film Festival in 2009. Some of her next projects were Another Me (2013), Learning to Drive (2014), Endless Night (2015), The Bookshop (2016), It Snows in Benidorm (2020)…
Coixet has earned numerous accolades, including multiple Goya Awards and National Film Award by the Spanish Ministry of Culture and Sports which was presented to her at the San Sebastián Film Festival in 2020.