A child of the early 2000s, Isabella Friedrich was born in Pennsylvania, where the ridgelines were high, the summers were hot, and the sky always felt a little too close. From a young age, she recruited neighborhood kids into backyard plays, orchestrating scenes, costumes, and dramatic reveals with the urgency of someone who already knew storytelling would be her life’s work.

​

At eighteen, she moved to New York City to study Film and Television at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she began writing and directing short films. There, her voice began to sharpen: intimate, elliptical, and deeply tied to place.

​

Isabella’s films are rooted in the eerie familiarity of Appalachian landscapes and the psychic residue of the towns that dot them. Inspired by overlooked gestures, unspoken tension, and the strangeness of home, her work explores memory, girlhood, and the tender violence of growing up.

​

Her latest projects blur the lines between fiction and personal history, drawing from her own experiences with a tactile sensibility and an eye for emotional subtext. As a director, she is interested in what people hide and what inevitably slips through — in beauty edged with discomfort, and in stories that haunt quietly.

.