Maya Deren was a very important experimental filmmaker for the avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s. Deren was also a choreographer, dancer, film theorist, poet, lecturer, writer and photographer.
The function of film, Deren believed, was to create an experience. She combined her expertise in dance and choreography, ethnography, the African spiritual religion of Haitian voodoo, symbolist poetry, and gestalt psychology (as a student of Kurt Koffka) into a series of perceptive black-and-white short films. Using editing, multiple exposures, jumps, superimposition, slow motion, and other camera techniques to her advantage, Deren abandoned conditional notions of physical space and time, innovating through carefully planned films with specific conceptual goals.

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), her collaboration with her then-husband Alexander Hammid, was one of the most influential experimental films in the history of American cinema. Deren made several other films, including, among others, At Land (1944), A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945), and Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946), writing, producing, directing, editing, and photographing them. with the help of just one other person, Hella Heyman, his camera operator.
Overall, she made six short films and several uncompleted films, including Witch's Cradle (1944), starring Marcel Duchamp.

She came to the US in 1922 as Eleanora Derenkovsky. Together with her father, Solomon Derenkowsky, a psychiatrist, and her mother, Maria Fidler, an artist, she fled the pogroms organized by the Bolsheviks against the Jews. She studied journalism and political science at Syracuse University in New York, finishing her bachelor's degree at New York University (NYU) in June 1936, and then receiving her master's degree in English literature from Smith College in 1939.

Deren is the author of two books, "An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film" 1946 (reprinted in "The Legend of Maya Deren", vol 1, part 2) and "Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti" ( 1953) - a book written after his first trip to Haiti in 1947 and which is still considered one of the most useful on Haitian Voudoun. Deren has written several articles about cinema and Haiti. Maya Deren shot over 18,000 feet of film in Haiti from 1947 to 1954 at Haitian Voudoun, parts of which can be seen in Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1993) made after her death by her then-husband Teiji Ito and his new wife Cherel Ito.

In 1947, Maya Deren became the first filmmaker to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship for creative work in motion pictures. She film theory, distributed her own films, selectively across the US and went to Cuba and Canada to promote her films using the written lecture-demonstration format to teach film theory, and Voudoun and the interrelationship between magic, science and religion. Deren created the Creative Film Foundation in the late 1950s to reward the achievements of independent filmmakers.