About

Madeleine Gottlieb is an award-winning Australian director, screenwriter and producer whose work spans film and premium television, with premieres at SXSW, TIFF, Tribeca, Series Mania, MIFF and Sydney Film Festival. A recipient of both Australian Directors’ Guild and AACTA Awards, she is known for her distinctive cinematic sensibility and psychologically rich, character-driven storytelling.

Most recently, Madeleine directed and executive produced all six episodes of Treasure & Dirt, a neo-noir mystery produced by Easy Tiger for the ABC in association with the BBC. Starring Michael Dorman and Liv Hewson and filmed in the otherworldly landscape of Coober Pedy, it premiered in July 2026. The Guardian gave it five stars, calling it “a gloriously strange detective mystery, unlike any you’ve seen before”.

Before that, she was set-up director of The Twelve: Cape Rock Killer for Warner Bros, Easy Tiger and Foxtel, directing six of its eight episodes. The series, starring Sam Neill, received five AACTA Award nominations, including Best Drama Series and Best Direction for Madeleine.

She set up Erotic Stories for Lingo Pictures and SBS, an anthology about lust, desire and intimacy that premiered at SXSW Sydney and received five AACTA nominations. Her SBS series Latecomers, a frank and irreverent exploration of sex and disability, screened in competition at Series Mania in Lille before winning both Australian Directors’ Guild and AACTA Awards.

Her short film Snare premiered in competition at SXSW and screened at Tribeca, Palm Springs, Seattle, Sydney and Melbourne before being acquired for the launch of Mailchimp Presents. You and Me, Before and After, starring Yael Stone and Emily Barclay, premiered at MIFF and TIFF and was nominated for AACTA and Australian Directors’ Guild Awards.

Madeleine is drawn to stories that expose the strangeness beneath ordinary life, combining psychological complexity, dark humour and an unsettling cinematic sensibility. Across genres, her work explores the contradictions of intimacy, identity and power, with a particular fascination for the ways people conceal themselves from one another.

She is currently developing a slate of original film and television projects.