Lilly Lion is a writer and director based between Los Angeles and Portland, OR. She comes from a small town in Oregon known for its Shakespeare Festival, marijuana farms, and friendly deer.

Lilly received her MFA in Directing from the American Film Institute Conservatory, where she was a Women in Film Scholarship recipient. Her thesis film, You & Me (& Chaz & Rodney), has screened at multiple Academy Award® and BAFTA-qualifying festivals around the world and recently won the George M. Sanger Grand Jury Award for Student Film at the Coronado Island Film Festival. Lilly has directed a total of nine short films and written two feature-length screenplays, currently in revision. Her first short, Deferment, a no-budget comedy about a man with a cow fetish and a recent grad trying to pay her student loans, screened at over ten festivals worldwide including Portland Film Festival and Hell's Half Mile Film and Music Festival. The screenplay for Deferment was a finalist in the ScreenCraft Short Film Fund competition.


She is presently in development for her first feature film, Tell Me I’m Beautiful. Lilly is drawn to stories about found family, female sexual discovery, and characters living on the fringes of society.