Jill Soloway

Soloway’s TV writing career began on shows such as The Oblongs, Nikki and The Steve Harvey Show. Soloway followed those shows by writing for four seasons on the HBO original series Six Feet Under, ultimately serving as co-executive producer. Six Feet Under ran for five seasons from 2001 to 2005. Soloway received 3 Emmy nominations in 2002, 2003 and 2005 for Outstanding Drama Series. Soloway's short story, Courteney Cox's Asshole, caught the attention of Alan Ball and led to the job.

In June 2019, Soloway signed on to write, direct and produce the Red Sonja remake.

Jewish religion and culture, queer sexuality, and gender are recurring themes in Soloway's show, Transparent. According to Soloway, "The Transparent narrative is not, then, just or even mostly about transition and transgender. It’s about big themes like familial secrets and transformation, revelation and change, all of which are rendered through the specificity and magic of television images and sounds, which create imaginative worlds."

Soloway is a strong supporter of feminism and co-founded the website Wifey.tv which is described as, "a curated video network for women" that includes content created by and for women. In an interview by Forbes, Soloway discusses the site saying, "I really like when our content appears to contradict itself at first glance. One day we might post something about sexism or the male gaze, then the next day post something that might be seen as precisely too sexy or raunchy, but it comes from a female creator or artist so it’s relevant. We love the conversation and don’t feel as dependent on insisting on a particular point of view."

In August 2016, Amazon premiered a Soloway-directed pilot of I Love Dick, based on the novel by the same name by Chris Kraus. It was later picked up for a full season, which premiered on May 12, 2017.

Besides exploring the theme of transgender, Jill Soloway has always been a strong advocate of feminism and has incorporated the female gaze in their works. As they said in the interview with Ariel Levy that “I'm always trying to bring the concept of play into the female gaze.” In September 2016, Soloway delivered a speech at the Toronto International Film Festival where they discussed the concept of the female gaze. Soloway divided the female gaze into three parts: reclaiming the female body, engaging the gaze, and returning the gaze. Wanting to be a different director and revolutionize the television arts and film industry, they used this platform to include the female gaze, in an attempt to show the viewers what women would feel, see, and experience when they were being watched by the opposite sex. It was mainly to show the women’s perspective. They explained in the speech for TIFF that storytelling about the female gaze was a “conscious effort to create empathy as a political tool.” For example, in the television show titled I Love Dick directed by Soloway, they said that this show was really about “the female voice...and creating protagonism for women.” According to an article written by Madeline Berg, the show portrays the male character as the object and “used for a sexual end.”

They co-wrote The Thanksgiving Paris Manifesto with Eileen Myles in 2016, which is a feminist manifesto about the pornography industry. The manifesto was posted on topplethepatriarchy.com, a domain purchased by Myles and Soloway. The manifesto opens with, "We shouldn’t be starting with porn but we must. We support the idea of a porn industry and the idea of people making a living photographing and sharing images of sex but we don’t support an industry that exclusively distributes portrayals of almost exclusively male pleasure and climax."

In 2015, Soloway's show Transparent won a Golden Globe for Best Series - Musical or Comedy. Later that same year, Soloway won a DGA Award and a Primetime Emmy Award for their work directing episode 1.08 ("Best New Girl") of the show. In 2016, Soloway won another Emmy for directing episode 2.09 (" Man on the Land") of Transparent. Also in 2016, Soloway was a finalist for The Advocate's Person of the Year, and was named to Oprah Winfrey's SuperSoul 100 list of visionaries and influential leaders.

Soloway created the pilot Transparent for Amazon.com, which became available for streaming and download on February 6, 2014, and was part of Amazon's second pilot season. Faith Soloway and her sibling Jill collaborate, including serving as co-writers on Transparent. They were inspired by their parent who came out as transgender. The show stars Gaby Hoffmann, Jay Duplass, and Amy Landecker as siblings whose parent (played by Jeffrey Tambor) reveals she is going through a significant life transition. The pilot for Transparent was picked up by Amazon Studios.

As part of the making of the show, Soloway enacted a "transfirmative action program", whereby transgender applicants were hired in preference to nontransgender ones. As of August 2014, over eighty transgender people have worked on the show, including two transgender consultants. All the bathrooms on set are gender-neutral.

Soloway wrote Hoffmann's role on Transparent especially for Hoffmann after seeing her performance on Louie. Transparent premiered all ten episodes simultaneously in late September 2014. The show wrapped its fourth season in 2017, and Amazon has renewed it for a fifth and final season to be released in 2019.

Soloway received two Primetime Emmys for Outstanding Directing in a Comedy Series in 2014 and 2016 for Transparent and the show has received Emmy nominations for Outstanding Comedy Series.

Soloway's elder sister, Faith, is a Boston-based musician and performer with whom Jill sometimes collaborates. Both Jill and Faith attended Lane Technical College Prep High School in Chicago. Jill Soloway graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Madison as a communications arts major.

While at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Soloway was a film and television student of JJ Murphy and participated in the creation of an undergraduate experimental narrative film entitled Ring of Fire as the assistant director under director Anita Katzman. After college Soloway worked as a production assistant in commercials and music videos in Chicago, as well as at Kartemquin Films on the movie Hoop Dreams.

Afternoon Delight (2013) was Soloway's feature film debut at Sundance for which they won the Directing Award. The film follows Rachel (Kathryn Hahn), a thirty-something woman who is struggling to rekindle her relationship with her husband (Josh Radnor), and ultimately befriends an exotic dancer (Juno Temple). In an interview by IndieWire, Soloway described their personal connection to the film's central character saying, "There’s a lot of me in Rachel’s journey. I’ve never brought a stripper home, but I’ve always loved reading the memoirs of strippers and sex workers. I feel like they’re the war reporters for women. They go to the front lines of a very particular kind of extreme conflict and live there, then write about it so we can experience it with them."

At the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, Soloway received the Directing Award (United States, Drama) for their first feature-length film, the 2013 comedy-drama Afternoon Delight. They have seven Emmy nominations and two wins. Soloway is also a member of the board of the San Francisco Film Society.

Soloway's first film was a 13-minute short titled Una Hora Por Favora, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012. The film stars Michaela Watkins and Wilmer Valderrama. The film tells the story of a woman (Watkins) who hires a day laborer (Valderrama) to do some handy work at her home, but her relationship soon goes beyond professional.

Soloway was born to a Jewish family in Chicago, Illinois, to public relations consultant, coach and writer, Elaine Soloway, and psychiatrist Dr. Harry J. Soloway, who grew up in London. Around 2011, Dr. Soloway came out as transgender.

In 2011, Soloway married music supervisor Bruce Gilbert, with whom Soloway had been in a relationship since 2008. They have a son named Felix Soloway Gilbert. Soloway's older son, Isaac, is from a prior relationship with artist John Strozier. In 2015, Soloway announced being in the process of separating from Gilbert, and that Soloway was in a relationship with poet Eileen Myles, whom Soloway met through Transparent; their romantic relationship has since ended, and Myles and Soloway held an event at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, in which they "processed [their] relationship onstage."

Soloway wrote the novella Jodi K., which was published in the collection Three Kinds of Asking For It: Erotic Novellas, edited by Susie Bright. Soloway's memoir, Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants: Based on a True Story, was released in hardcover in 2005, and then in paperback in 2006. In 2018, Soloway published another book, She Wants It: Desire, Power and Toppling the Patriarchy, with Ebury Press, a division of Penguin Random House. In it, Soloway narrates their experiences after their parent's coming out as transgender, with particular focus on their awakening as non-binary.

Jill Soloway (born September 26, 1965) is an American television creator, showrunner, director and writer. Soloway is known for creating, writing, executive producing and directing the Amazon original series Transparent, winning two Emmys for the show; directing and writing the film Afternoon Delight, winning the Best Director award at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival; and producing Six Feet Under.