Joey Soloway

Soloway was born in Chicago, Illinois to writer and public relations consultant Elaine Soloway and psychiatrist Carrie Soloway, who grew up in London. Around 2011, Carrie Soloway came out as transgender. Soloway's elder sibling Faith Soloway is a Boston-based musician and performer, with whom Joey sometimes collaborates. Both Joey and Faith attended Lane Technical College Prep High School in Chicago. Joey Soloway graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Madison as a communications arts major. Soloway's mother was formerly a press aide to Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne and was a former communications director for School Superintendent Ruth Love. After 30 years, Soloway's parents divorced in 1990. Soloway has a stepfather named Tommy Madison. ==Career==

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. Television 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 three 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. It was later picked up for a full season, which premiered on May 12, 2017. Transparent 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. Joey and Faith Soloway collaborated on Transparent, including serving as co-writers. Joey was inspired by their parent who came out as a transgender woman. The show stars Gaby Hoffmann, Jay Duplass, and Amy Landecker as siblings whose parent (played by Jeffrey Tambor) reveals she is going through a . 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 non-transgender ones. Transparent premiered all ten episodes simultaneously in late September 2014. The show wrapped its fourth season in 2017, and concluded with a movie finale 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 debut at Sundance, Afternoon Delight (2013) 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 had a personal connection to the film's central character, explaining "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." Afternoon Delight played at national and international film festivals and was nominated for multiple awards, including a Gotham Award for Breakthrough Performance for Hahn and a Spirit Award for First Feature. In June 2019, Soloway signed on to write, direct and produce the Red Sonja remake. Soloway later left the project but remained an executive producer. Writing 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 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. Jewish religion and culture, sexuality, and gender are recurring themes in Soloway's show, Transparent. The term male gaze was first coined by Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema and, just like Mulvey, Soloway gives their own definition of the Female Gaze in three parts. Part one: "reclaiming the body, using it with intention to communicate Feeling Seeing". Then, part two: the gazed gaze which Soloway describes as taking the camera and using it to show how it feels to be the object of the gaze. And part three: a "Socio-Political justice-demanding way of art making" and returning the gaze. ==Honors==

Soloway has seven Emmy nominations and two wins. In 2015, Soloway's show Transparent won a Golden Globe for Best Series - Musical or Comedy, which Soloway dedicated to Leelah Alcorn after her suicide the year prior. Later that same year, Soloway won a DGA Award and a Primetime Emmy Award for 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 was inducted into the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame in 2022. ==Personal life==

In 2011, Soloway married music supervisor Bruce Gilbert, with whom Soloway had been in a relationship since 2008. They have a son. Soloway's older son is from a prior relationship with artist John Strozier. In 2015, Soloway announced their separation 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". In Soloway's memoir She Wants It, Soloway discusses accepting a nonbinary identity at age 50 after filming the first two seasons of Transparent. Activism 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." Soloway also co-founded the East Side Jews collective, which is funded by the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles. The collective "brings together 20- and 30-something Jews in Silver Lake and the surrounding neighborhoods of Los Angeles for offbeat, too-cool-for-shul events that tend to be heavy on comedy and light on Jewish ritual." which is a feminist manifesto about the pornography industry. The manifesto was posted on topplethepatriarchy.com, a domain purchased by Myles and Soloway. ==Works or publications==

• Bright, Susie, Eric Albert, Greta Christina, and Jill Soloway. "Jodi K." (novella) Susie Bright Presents: Three Kinds of Asking for It: Erotic Novellas, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005; • Soloway, Jill. Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants: Based on a True Story, New York: Free Press, 2005; • Soloway, Jill. She Wants It: Desire, Power, and Toppling the Patriarchy, Crown Archetype, 2018; ==References==