Lizzie Borden (born 1950; some sources say 1958) is an American filmmaker, best known for her early independent films Born in Flames (1983) and Working Girls (1986). Early life The daughter of a Detroit stockbroker, she was originally named Linda Elizabeth Borden. At the age of eleven she decided to take the name of the infamous accused double murderer Lizzie Borden, the inspiration for this children's rhyme: Lizzie Borden took an axe And gave her father forty whacks, When she saw what she had done, She gave her mother forty-one Of her announcement to her parents that she was legally changing her name, Borden says, "At the time, my name was the best rebellion I could make." Early career Borden majored in fine arts at Wellesley College in Massachusetts before moving to New York City, and began her career as a writer, art critic (with several articles and reviews for Artforum from 1972-1974) and painter. After attending a retrospective of the films of Jean-Luc Godard, she was inspired to become a filmmaker and to experiment with cinema, favoring a "naive" approach to film production. Borden made an experimental documentary film in 1976, Regrouping, which chronicled the fracturing of a women's collective. The film portrait of four women artists incorporated avant-garde techniques borrowed from performance art, including a meta-analysis of the role of film itself in the fracturing of the collective that the film portrayed. The documentary was shown along with her next film, Born in Flames (1983), at an Anthology Film Archives screening in 2016. Independent film career Borden's films have been said to be united by an "iconoclastic depiction of sex" – notably, she controversially portrayed prostitution as an "economic choice" in her 1986 film Working Girls. Her body of work also investigates race, class, power, capitalism, and the power that money bestows — all from a feminist viewpoint. Borden's first feature, Born in Flames, was shot and edited over five years with a budget of $30,000, and completed in 1983. Set in a near-future New York City, the film explores the role media plays in culture. What began as a project about white feminist responses to an oppressive government evolved into a story about women of color, lesbians, and white women of various classes mobilizing into collective action. The film concerned the racial, class, and political conflicts in a future United States socialist democracy. The film is named