Screenwriter, director and producer Marquise Lepage won critical and public acclaim with her very first film, Marie s'en va-t-en ville, in 1987. The fiction feature, which tells the story of a runaway girl who befriends an aging prostitute, was shown in a dozen international festivals, and picked up four Genie nominations in addition to being named Best Foreign Film at the Belfort Festival in France.

Two years later, her documentary Un soleil entre deux nuages, which depicted the courage of children with terminal illnesses, was just as warmly received. It was shown widely and won the Gémeaux Award for Best Editing, the Ecumenical Jury Prize at the Festival de Nyon (Switzerland), and the Grand prix des bibliothèques de France at the Festival du réel, in Paris.

Employed at the NFB from 1991 to 1994, Lepage directed Your Country, My Country (Dans ton pays, 1992), a fiction short about racial prejudice; Mon Amérique à moi (1993), a documentary on travel and aspirations; and La fête des Rois (1994), a feature-length fiction film about families and modernity that enjoyed considerable success with critics and audiences alike.

Released to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of cinema, The Lost Garden: The Life and Cinema of Alice Guy-Blaché (Le jardin oublié - La vie et l'œuvre d'Alice Guy-Blaché, 1995), a documentary tribute to history's first woman filmmaker, made the rounds of the international festival circuit and picked up several awards, including a Gémeaux for Best Documentary.

In 1997, she directed episodes of the TV series La courte échelle, which went on to win the Gémeaux Award for Best Children's Series. The next year, her short fiction work Pour la vie took home the prize for Best Healthcare Prevention Document at the International Festival of Multimedia and Video in Healthcare (Canada).

Lepage's style has consistently been typified by seriousness, the proper tone, and intense sensitivity toward her subjects. In 1999, her documentary Of Hopscotch and Little Girls: Stolen Childhood (Des marelles et des petites filles...), a series of heart-rending portraits of young girls in India, Thailand, Yemen, Peru, Burkina Faso and Haiti, won several international festival prizes. It was shown at the United Nations in New York as part of the Beijing Plus Five meeting in August 2000, and at UNESCO headquarters in Paris in November 2000. A few years later, in the fall of 2008, a counterpart documentary, Boys, Toys and the Big Blue Marble (Des billes, des ballons et des garçons) examined the living conditions of boys in various parts of the world.

In the years following 2000, Lepage directed a number of productions for television, including the episode covering 1959 to 1973 for Canada: A People's History (2002); Ma vie c'est le théâtre (2004); Par tous les seins (2005); Le Rouge et le Noir... Au service du Blanc, L'esclavage en Nouvelle-France (2005); Les délateurs (2005); Jacques Parizeau, l'homme derrière le complet (2006); and Vive les fêtes! (2007). Martha of the North (2008) is her most recent film as director produced at the NFB.

An active player in the filmmaking community, Lepage is a past president of the Association des réalisateurs et réalisatrices du Québec (ARRQ), and currently sits on the Board of Directors of the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television's Quebec Division. In addition to the many awards received for her films, she was named an "Artiste pour la paix" in 1999.