Golden Globe Award for Best Director

The Golden Globe Award for Best Director – Motion Picture is a Golden Globe Award that has been presented annually by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, an organization composed of journalists who cover the United States film industry for publications based outside North America, since 1943.

Having won all four of his nominations, Elia Kazan has been honored most often in this category. Clint Eastwood, Miloš Forman, David Lean, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Oliver Stone tie for second place with three wins each. Steven Spielberg has had the most nominations (fourteen). Barbra Streisand, Chloé Zhao and Jane Campion are the only women to have won the award.

Receiving the award in 1984 for Yentl, Barbra Streisand became the first woman to win the Golden Globe for Best Director.

She remained the only woman to win a Golden Globe for directing for 37 years until Chloé Zhao won the award for Nomadland in 2021 and became the second woman and the first Asian woman to do so.

In the following lists, the first names, listed in bold type against a blue background, are the winners, and the following names are the remaining nominees. The years given are those in which the films under consideration were released, not the year of the ceremony, which takes place in January of the following year.

More than 5 nominations

 * Steven Spielberg (14/3)
 * Martin Scorsese (10/3)
 * Clint Eastwood (7/3)
 * Fred Zinnemann (7/2)
 * Francis Ford Coppola (6/2)
 * Sidney Lumet (6/1)

5 nominations

 * Woody Allen (5/0)
 * John Huston (5/2)
 * Stanley Kramer (5/1)
 * Mike Nichols (5/1)
 * Billy Wilder (5/2)
 * Robert Wise (5/0)

4 nominations

 * Robert Altman (4/1)
 * David Fincher (4/1)
 * Miloš Forman (4/3)
 * Peter Jackson (4/1)
 * Elia Kazan (4/4)
 * Stanley Kubrick (4/0)
 * David Lean (4/3)
 * Ang Lee (4/2)
 * Alexander Payne (4/0)
 * Robert Redford (4/1)
 * Rob Reiner (4/0)
 * Ridley Scott (4/0)
 * Oliver Stone (4/3)
 * Quentin Tarantino (4/0)
 * Peter Weir (4/0)
 * William Wyler (4/1)

3 nominations

 * Hal Ashby (3/0)
 * Richard Attenborough (3/1)
 * Bernardo Bertolucci (3/1)
 * James L. Brooks (3/0)
 * James Cameron (3/2)
 * George Cukor (3/1)
 * Ron Howard (3/0)
 * Alejandro González Iñárritu (3/1)
 * James Ivory (3/0)
 * Norman Jewison (3/0)
 * Sam Mendes (3/2)
 * Anthony Minghella (3/0)
 * Vincente Minnelli (3/1)
 * Christopher Nolan (3/1)
 * Alan Parker (3/0)
 * Sydney Pollack (3/0)
 * John Schlesinger (3/0)
 * George Stevens (3/0)

2 nominations

 * Kathryn Bigelow (2/0)
 * Peter Bogdanovich (2/0)
 * John Boorman (2/0)
 * Richard Brooks (2/0)
 * Jane Campion (2/1)
 * George Clooney (2/0)
 * Bradley Cooper (2/0)
 * Joel Coen (2/0)
 * Alfonso Cuarón (2/2)
 * Stephen Daldry (2/0)
 * Bob Fosse (2/0)
 * William Friedkin (2/2)
 * John Frankenheimer (2/0)
 * Mel Gibson (2/1)
 * Roland Joffé (2/0)
 * Spike Lee (2/0)
 * Barry Levinson (2/0)
 * Joshua Logan (2/1)
 * George Lucas (2/0)
 * Baz Luhrmann (2/0)
 * David Lynch (2/0)
 * Joseph L. Mankiewicz (2/0)
 * Martin McDonagh (2/0)
 * Robert Mulligan (2/0)
 * Roman Polanski (2/1)
 * Otto Preminger (2/0)
 * Martin Ritt (2/0)
 * David O. Russell (2/0)
 * Mark Rydell (2/0)
 * Steven Soderbergh (2/0)
 * Barbra Streisand (2/1)
 * Peter Yates (2/0)
 * Edward Zwick (2/0)

Multiple winners

 * 4 awards
 * Elia Kazan


 * 3 awards


 * Clint Eastwood
 * Miloš Forman
 * David Lean
 * Martin Scorsese
 * Steven Spielberg
 * Oliver Stone


 * 2 awards


 * James Cameron
 * Francis Ford Coppola
 * Alfonso Cuarón
 * William Friedkin
 * John Huston
 * Ang Lee
 * Sam Mendes
 * Billy Wilder
 * Fred Zinnemann