Maria Finitzo is a two-time Peabody Award-winning social issue documentary filmmaker whose body of work has won every major broadcast award including most recently the Alfred E duPont Award and has been screened in festivals and theaters around the world. Her films are novelistic in their structure, providing multiple points of connection for an audience. She allows the narrative arc of her character’s story to evolve, colliding with other subjects from the film, creating a complex, nuanced story that serves as a vehicle to deepen our understanding of society through everyday human drama. Finitzo is also a screenwriter and fiction film director. In 2014, she founded Film Arts Productions, LLC a production company dedicated to producing independent fiction films. Her interest in fiction filmmaking is a natural evolution of her commitment to exploring different realms of storytelling. Those Left Behind, her first feature film, from her original screenplay is in distribution. Finitzo's next fiction project is A Taste of Life, an adaptation of the award-winning story Passion by Nobel Prize author Alice Munro. The Dilemma of Desire, a film that explores female sexual desire is Finitzo’s next documentary project and will be finished for the 2020 Festival season.