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.

Winners and nominees

1940s

1950s

1960s

1970s

1980s

1990s

2000s

2010s

2020s

Multiple nominations

More than 5 nominations

5 nominations

4 nominations

3 nominations

2 nominations

Multiple winners

General