Stacy Cochran is an American film director, screenwriter and producer based in New York City. She is best known for her films My New Gun (1992) and Boys (1996).

Cochran was born in Passaic, New Jersey. She graduated from Williams College as a Political Science major, and earned her MFA in film from Columbia University. Cochran received the Arthur Levitt Artist-in-Residence at Williams College in 2002. She was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) from 2006-2014 and was head of its Program Advisory committee.

Cochran is part of the wave of independent writer-directors whose first movies appeared in the 1990s.

Cochran wrote My New Gun as a thesis script for her MFA degree. She began directing the comedy within weeks of completing film school, financed by Columbia TriStar HV and produced by IRS Media. Ed Lachman came on as cinematographer and Diane Lane joined the project as the young housewife whose husband gives her a gun for protection that she neither needs nor wants. The movie received enthusiastic acclaim in its premiere at Director's Fortnight at Cannes (1992), and earned an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best First Feature. It has been described as an examination of surburbia.

My New Gun, with a score by Pat Irwin, continued to play at festivals including the Toronto Film Festival where it was seen by The New Yorker critics Michael Sragow and Terrence Rafferty. Rafferty's review stated that “Cochran’s isn’t a satirist’s world, or a cartoonist’s, or a fairy-tale teller’s; it’s more like a novelist’s. Yet the sort of liberation that ‘My New Gun’ proposes, and embodies, is the product of a true filmmaker's vision.” Hal Hinson of The Washington Post described it as "Stacy Cochran's coolly funny, immaculately modulated first feature." Janet Maslin of The New York Times stated, “‘My New Gun’ is a delectably wry slice of suburban life, imagined by Ms. Cochran and played with perfect bewilderment by the enormously appealing Ms. Lane.” Manohla Dargis of The Village Voice wrote, “In ‘My New Gun,’ director Stacy Cochran doesn't fetishize sidearms. A restless signifier, the gun is passed back and forth between Debbie and Skippy like a hot potato. It's a symbolic exchange as telling as it is funny. In ‘My New Gun,’ the .38 in question is both a rod and a piece, male and female, a sign of just how fluid gender roles can be.”

Following the success of My New Gun, Cochran was approached to develop a feature film based on Twenty Minutes, a short story by James Salter about a woman who falls off her horse and lies dying in a meadow. She reconceived the eight-page story as a dark but comic riff on the tale of Snow White, and won Salter’s approval to move forward with the film.

Interscope Pictures signed on to produce the resulting Boys, and attached Winona Ryder and Lukas Haas to play the lead roles. The movie’s two leads were separated from Cochran during filming, despite her being the movie’s writer/director, and the film was subsequently subjected to an unexpectedly extensive editing process. The distributor, Touchstone Pictures, was ultimately unwilling to screen Boys for critics or press before its release.

The New Yorker critic Terrence Rafferty chose to write about the movie anyway, going to see it on its theatrical release date. He published a review, describing the film as “Essentially a screwball comedy, but one that dares to do without the familiar contrivances of farce. What holds the movie’s volatile mixture of tones and characters together is the filmmaker’s willingness to ride her own complex romantic sensibility as far as it will take her. This young filmmaker may have a more deeply subversive sensibility than any of her celebrated peers.” He went on to state, “No wonder ‘Boys’ has baffled almost everyone. Cochran keeps throwing screwballs to viewers who can't seem to handle anything but the hard stuff anymore.”