Darya Zhuk is an independent film director and playwright of Belarusian origin. She was born in Minsk in 1980, at the age of 16 she left to the USA where she studied economics at Harvard and started her career as a business analyst at HBO. She became interested in filmmaking and in 2014 graduated with honors from Columbia MFA in Directing. Zhuk's credits as director and playwright include detective drama Zato for Netflix, Russian Affairs for Amazon Europe, Little America for Apple TV+, and many more. As an independent director, she won such prestigious grants as New York State Council for the Arts, Panavision Emerging Filmmaker grant, and Interdisciplinary Council for the Art of Columbia University.