Charise M. Studesville is an award-winning filmmaker, bestselling author, and mixed media artist whose work stands at the intersection of raw truth and ethereal craft. As the founder of Lotus Girl Films, she creates stories that transcend genre — intimate in scale, universal in resonance, and built for audiences who hunger for complexity and heart.

Her work dwells in the liminal space between grit and glamour. Her celebrated short works — The Hands and Return of Alice— established her signature aesthetic: unflinching emotional precision wrapped in visual poetry. And her current work positions Lotus Girl Films as a company with both an artistic mandate and a commercial center of gravity.

Studesville’s work is driven by a lifelong obsession with secrets — what goes unspoken, what’s hidden, and what happens when truths rise to the surface. She channels this into characters of startling depth and narratives that reveal the human capacity to rise from the murkiest of waters without losing sight of the beauty that remains.

Her literary voice carries equal weight. The Perks of Being a Hoodoo Rose, her book series featuring the Rose sisters, explores what she calls the “midlife second puberty” period — the seismic, unexcavated, and misinterpreted terrain where earned wisdom collides with radical reinvention. Her upcoming “mixed-media memoir” chronicles her years embedded in 1980s New York City’s art and party scene, placing her work alongside a growing canon of personal and cultural reclamation. She is not simply a storyteller. She is a builder of artistic totems — objects of grief, beauty, and transformation that outlast the moment of their making. Her work doesn’t chase the zeitgeist. It exists within it.

Studesville is a proud member of Film Fatales, and the Alliance of Women Directors, and is the founder of Hollywood Chick Mafia — a community of rebel chicks supporting one another’s badassery.