Mary Robertson

Mary Robertson is an Emmy Award-winning director. Most recently Mary was the showrunner of The New York Times Presents’, the anthology documentary series from the New York Times, Left/Right, FX, and Hulu. Her efforts for the series include the films ‘Framing Britney Spears’, and ‘Controlling Britney Spears’, both critically lauded documentaries that have touched off a reckoning on Spears’ treatment, misogyny, conservatorships, mental health, and tabloid culture. ‘Framing Britney Spears’ broke ratings records around the world, was nominated for two Primetime Emmy Awards including Outstanding Nonfiction Documentary or Special and won the Television Critics Association Award for Outstanding Achievement in News and Information.

Before her work on ‘The New York Times Presents’ Mary was one of the creators of ‘The Weekly’, whose first season garnered nine Emmy nominations and four wins. Prior to that Mary created and directed the award-winning all-archival limited series ‘Tricky Dick’ for CNN. The Wall Street Journal described ‘Tricky Dick’ as a “remarkably penetrating portrait of Richard Nixon” and named it to its year-end best of TV list. Before that she directed the feature documentary ‘Trumped’ which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and premiered on Showtime. And before that Mary developed the inaugural season of Showtime’s doc series on the Presidential election ‘The Circus: Inside the Greatest Political Show on Earth’. Season one of ‘The Circus’ was honored with IDA, and Television Critics Association nominations and the series is now in its sixth season. Additionally, Mary directed and wrote five films for Frontline on PBS, two of which received Emmy nominations.

Some of Mary’s earlier credits include multiple stories produced for ‘This American Life’, the SXSW award-winning digital series ‘She’s the Ticket’, and dozens of hours of non-fiction television for PBS, History, Discovery, and AMC networks (to name a few). Mary is a member of the Writers Guild of America and the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. A lifelong New Yorker, she graduated with honors from the film studies program at Wesleyan and today she proudly calls Brooklyn home.