Mary Robertson is an Emmy Award-winning executive producer and director. In 2022, she founded Maxine, a film and television production company devoted to the creation of extraordinary journalist and filmmaker-driven nonfiction work. Maxine is proudly part of Sony Pictures Television’s nonfiction group.
Prior to founding Maxine, Mary was the showrunner of The New York Times Presents, the anthology documentary series from the New York Times, Left/Right, FX and Hulu. Her efforts for the series include 'Framing Britney Spears' and ‘Controlling Britney Spears’, both critically-lauded documentaries that have touched-off a reckoning on Spears' treatment, misogyny, conservatorships and tabloid culture. ‘Framing Britney Spears’ broke ratings records around the world, was nominated for two Primetime Emmy Awards including Outstanding Nonfiction Documentary or Special and won the Television Critics Association Award for Outstanding Achievement in News and Information. ‘Controlling Britney Spears’ was also nominated for the Emmy Award for Outstanding Nonfiction Documentary or Special and the Television Critics Association Award for Outstanding Achievement in News and Information. In the wake of both films, Ms. Spears’s father was suspended as conservator, and the judge terminated the conservatorship entirely.
Before her work on The New York Times Presents Mary helped create and executive produce The Weekly, whose first season garnered nine Emmy nominations and four wins. Prior to that Mary created, directed and executive produced the award-winning all-archival limited series Tricky Dick for CNN. The Wall Street Journal described Tricky Dick as a, “remarkably penetrating portrait of Richard Nixon” and named it to its year-end best of TV list. Before that she directed and produced the feature documentary Trumped which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and premiered on Showtime. And before that Mary helped develop and executive produce the inaugural season of Showtime’s doc series on the Presidential election ‘The Circus: Inside the Greatest Political Show on Earth’. Season one of The Circus was honored with IDA, and Television Critics Association nominations and the series is now in its seventh season. Additionally Mary directed, produced and wrote five films for Frontline on PBS, two of which received Emmy nominations.
Some of Mary’s earlier credits include multiple stories produced for This American Life, the SXSW award-winning digital series ‘She’s the Ticket’, the short doc ‘Missed Connections’ which premiered in competition at the Tribeca Film Festival before going on to play at over 20 festivals, and dozens of hours of non-fiction television for PBS, History, Discovery and AMC networks (to name a few). Mary is a member of the Writers Guild of America and the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. A lifelong New Yorker, she graduated from Wesleyan and today she proudly calls Brooklyn home. Mary and Maxine are represented by CAA.