Betsey Brown (filmmaker)

Betsey Brown is an American actress and director best known for starring in The Scary of Sixty-First and for directing and performing in the 2021 satire Actors.

Brown was born and raised in Manhattan. Her father, Ron Brown, is a filmmaker, and her mother, Jane Brown, is a psychoanalyst. Her brother is actor and filmmaker Peter Vack.

After appearing in a number of short films and bit roles, Brown wrote, directed, and starred in the 2015 short film Shegetsey Betsey, which won the Audience Award for Best Experimental Short at the New Orleans Film Festival. Brown starred in the 2021 film The Scary of Sixty-First, directed by Dasha Nekrasova.

Brown's feature debut, Actors, was released in 2021. Actors has attracted controversy, as the plot centers a cisgender man (played by Peter Vack) who, in an attempt to further his career as a filmmaker, poses as a trans woman, despite not truly identifying as such. Brown and Vack initially stated on their Kickstarter page for Actors that the film is not a reflection of "the trans experience", but rather a depiction of "white cis male fragility" and "the lengths some will go to keep their seat at the table". However, a 2023 screening of Actors at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago was cancelled in the wake of public backlash towards the film, which included transgender director Jane Schoenbrun labeling the film as transphobic in a tweet directed at the theater.

Brown frequently collaborates with her brother, Peter Vack. She appeared in his 2017 film Assholes, while he starred in Actors. She starred as Rachel Ormont alongside Nekrasova and Chloe Cherry in Vack's film www.RachelOrmont.com, which premiered at the 2024 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. That year, Brown served a juror for the 2024 Florida Film Festival.

• Betsey Brown at IMDb