Maya Deren was born Eleanora Derenkowsky on April 29, 1917, in Kyiv, then part of the Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine).
Eleanora Derenkowsky was born on April 29, 1917, in Kyiv, in what was then the Russian Empire and is now Ukraine. She was the daughter of Solomon Derenkowsky, a psychiatrist, and Marie Fiedler. Her family were Ukrainian Jews who, amid the turmoil following the Russian Revolution and rising antisemitic violence, emigrated to the United States in 1922, when Eleanora was about five years old.
The family settled in Syracuse, New York, where her father anglicized the family name to Deren. This early uprooting and immigrant experience would inform Deren's lifelong fascination with identity, transformation, and ritual — themes that later became central to her groundbreaking experimental films. Her father's psychiatric background and the household's intellectual atmosphere also exposed young Eleanora to psychological and philosophical ideas from an early age.
Though her birth in Kyiv is sometimes cited with slight variation in sources due to the chaos of the era and subsequent calendar/record discrepancies, April 29, 1917 is the most widely accepted date across biographical and archival sources. This origin as an immigrant, a woman, and eventually an artist working entirely outside the Hollywood studio system positioned her to become one of the most influential pioneers of American avant-garde cinema.
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