Kramer was born on September 1, 1981. She attended
Emerson College in
Boston, Massachusetts, with the intent of becoming a playwright and theater director. She graduated from Emerson at 20 years old. After graduating from college, Kramer moved to
Los Angeles, California. She first worked as a
vintage clothing buyer upon moving there, though she had ambitions to pursue theater. Kramer's debut short film
Bark premiered in 2016 at
Fantastic Fest. Kramer began creating her debut film
Paris Window, co-written with screenwriter Noel David Taylor, in 2017. A comedy surrounding the destructive relationship between two siblings, the film was primarily shot in Kramer's apartment. She then began
principal photography on her next film, the
suspense thriller Ladyworld, in January 2018. Co-written with screenwriter Benjamin Shearn,
Ladyworld follows a group of teenage girls who, during a
sleepover, become trapped in a basement after an
earthquake. The film was partially inspired by the 1954
William Golding novel
Lord of the Flies, and Kramer has emphasized that the need to depict young women's capacity for cruelty was important to her when making the film. The film was subsequently awarded the Jury Prize for Creative Vision at the
Downtown Los Angeles Film Festival in October 2018.
Ladyworld premiered on September 22, 2018, at Fantastic Fest, prior to screening at the
BFI London Film Festival and the
Toronto International Film Festival. On July 29, 2019, four days before the theatrical release of
Ladyworld,
Talkhouse published an essay of Kramer's entitled "Why Does Everything Look So Fucking Ugly?", a commentary on what she perceived as the visual blandness and homogeneity of contemporary film and television.
Ladyworld was then theatrically released on August 2, 2019, followed by a release on
DVD and
video-on-demand platforms on August 27.
Paris Window was later released on
Amazon,
Vimeo, and Filmhub in 2019. In November 2019, Ethan Warren, a frequent contributor to the film essay website
Bright Wall/Dark Room, named Kramer as a director who will define the 2020s in a piece for
IndieWire. On March 18, 2020, the music video for
Maya Hawke's song "By Myself," which Kramer directed, was released. Hawke had previously starred in
Ladyworld. In October 2020, Kramer began shooting her next feature film,
Please Baby Please, again co-written with Noel David Taylor. Starring
Andrea Riseborough,
Harry Melling,
Karl Glusman, and
Demi Moore, the film is set in the 1950s and follows a married couple who begin to question their relationship, as well as their own conceptions of
gender identity, upon witnessing a murder committed by a group of
greasers. While in the process of making
Please Baby Please, Kramer began writing the script for her next film,
Give Me Pity!, which she has said was borne out of frustration with the length of the development process for the former film. "I was like, 'I could do this bare bones, like 10 people, $100,000 or less over the course of five days,'" she said in a 2023 interview with
Filmmaker.
Give Me Pity! began shooting in July 2021.
Please Baby Please premiered on January 26, 2022, as the opening film of the
51st International Film Festival Rotterdam. The film was released in theaters on October 28, 2022.
Give Me Pity! also premiered as an official selection at the 51st International Film Festival Rotterdam. In 2023,
So Unreal, Kramer's first
documentary feature, premiered at the 18th annual Fantastic Fest. Narrated by
Blondie frontwoman
Debbie Harry, the film discusses how the evolution of
technology has been depicted in film.
So Unreal will be released by
Altered Innocence in North America in fall 2025, with Yellow Veil Pictures handling international distribution. In 2025, Kramer's next film
By Design, starring
Juliette Lewis and
Mamoudou Athie, premiered at the
2025 Sundance Film Festival. The film follows a woman who swaps bodies with a chair. == Artistry ==