Lizzie Borden

Lizzie Borden (born 1950; some sources say 1958) is an American filmmaker, best known for her early independent films Born in Flames (1983) and Working Girls (1986). Early life The daughter of a Detroit stockbroker, she was originally named Linda Elizabeth Borden. At the age of eleven she decided to take the name of the infamous accused double murderer Lizzie Borden, the inspiration for this children's rhyme: Lizzie Borden took an axe And gave her father forty whacks, When she saw what she had done, She gave her mother forty-one Of her announcement to her parents that she was legally changing her name, Borden says, "At the time, my name was the best rebellion I could make." Early career Borden majored in fine arts at Wellesley College in Massachusetts before moving to New York City, and began her career as a writer, art critic (with several articles and reviews for Artforum from 1972-1974) and painter. After attending a retrospective of the films of Jean-Luc Godard, she was inspired to become a filmmaker and to experiment with cinema, favoring a "naive" approach to film production.