Talya Lavie

Talya Lavie was born in 1978 in Petah Tikva

Talya Lavie was born in Petah Tikva on 27 April 1978. She lived on a kibbutz for some years and moved to Tel Aviv in 1991. Her father was a career IDF officer who later worked as an accountant, and her mother was a teacher.

She studied visual arts at Thelma Yellin, focusing on comics. She began studying animation at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, then moved to the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School in Jerusalem, graduating in 2005. Her student shorts won prizes at the Locarno and Berlin film festivals.

In the IDF she served as a clerk in a general's office and later at a southern base. This experience inspired her film Zero Motivation, which grew out of her 2006 short The Substitute.

Zero Motivation premiered at the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival and won its narrative feature prize. It won 6 Ophir Awards, 2 of them for Lavie as director and screenwriter. Her second feature, the romantic comedy Honeymood, received 8 Ophir nominations, and in 2021 she co-created and directed the series Sad City Girls.

She teaches screenwriting at the Sam Spiegel school. She is developing Seven Eyes, a drama about female soldiers on the Gaza border on October 7. Her video installation Observation opened at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in November 2025.