Therese Shechter

THERESE SHECHTER (Director/Producer) deftly uses humor-spiked, personal narrative to chronicle 21st Century feminism, most recently as the writer and director of the in-the-works documentary HOW TO LOSE YOUR VIRGINITY. She also blogs about virginity and female sexuality and curates the First Person Project, a crowed-sourced collection of stories about ‘sexual debuts and deferrals.’ Therese is active in the New York feminist activist community, creating videos about SlutwalkNYC, a counter-protest at a Brooklyn abortion clinic and an even parody of Reality TV shows. Shechter was a panelist at Harvard University’s Rethinking Virginity conference, has presented FEELS LIKE THE FIRST TIME: A VIRGINITY PRIMER for live audiences from Brooklyn’s Galapagos Art Space to Hunter College’s Gender Studies Program, and has done live readings of her work for Bad Feminist Readings and In the Flesh. Her writing has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Women & Hollywood, Girl With Pen, Adios Barbie, Film Independent, and the Bitch Magazine blog,

Shechter’s first feature documentary, the award-winning I WAS A TEENAGE FEMINIST(2005), has screened from Stockholm to Delhi to Rio and in Belgrade at Serbia’s first-ever Women’s Film Festival, and is distributed by Women Make Movies. Her short documentary HOW I LEARNED TO SPEAK TURKISH (2006) also screened internationally and now streams online through IndiePix. Prior to becoming a filmmaker, Therese was a journalist and visual editor at the Chicago Tribune, where she managed a staff of 17 and provided visual direction for two Pulitzer-Prize-winning projects. A conservative blogger recently labeled her a "Brazen Advocate of Slut Culture." (4/13)

How to Lose Your Virginity
A film by Therese Shechter, 2013, 66 min., Color
Female virginity. The US government has spent 1.5 billion dollars promoting it. It has fetched $750,000 at auction. There is no official medical defin...

I Was a Teenage Feminist
A film by Therese Shechter, 2005, 62 min., Color
Why is it that some young, independent, progressive women in today's society feel uncomfortable identifying with the F-word? Join filmmaker Therese Sh...