Biography
Maria Tran is an award-winning, versatile Vietnamese-Australian actor, filmmaker, and martial artist based in the US. She has worked across film, television, stage, and fight action choreography. Her international film credits include Fist of the Dragon (2014), Death Mist, and Tracer (2016).
In 2013, she earned the Breakout Female Performer award at the International Action on Film Festival, and in 2016, she was named Female Action Performer of the Year at MartialCon. Maria directed and produced Hit Girls (2013), a female-led action comedy. In Australia, her TV appearances include My Place (2009), Maximum Choppage: Round 2 (2010), Street Smart (2018), and Fat Pizza: Back in Business (2019).
She has also performed stunts in films such as The Meg (2018) and Jackie Chan's Bleeding Steel (2017).
In 2022, just five months after relocating to the United States, Maria secured her breakthrough role as Madame Tien in the Paramount+ Australia drama series Last King of the Cross (2023), starring Tim Roth. Her stage work includes fight directing and performing for Bell Shakespeare's Macbeth and her own theater production Action Star, which debuted at the OzAsia Festival in Adelaide in 2022. She received the prestigious $50,000 Create NSW Western Sydney Arts Fellowship and founded Phoenix Eye Films, a female-led film and art collective based in Western Sydney.
Maria is also recognized for her documentary work, notably My Mother, the Action Star (2020), which won Best Film at the WIFT-V Fest Film Festival.
She occasionally serves as an action fight director for projects such as Ayotti (2021) and the Terror Zone proof-of-concept.
Her micro-budget action thriller Echo 8 (2024) has garnered multiple awards, including Best Film at the Tokyo Film Awards and Best Feature Film - Women's Film at the World Carnival-Singapore Film Festival. Maria is a pioneering figure known for her community engagement, cultural contributions, and development efforts within the film, TV, and entertainment industries.
