Goya Award for Best New Director

The award was first presented at the fourth edition of the Goya Awards with Ana Díez being the first winner for her film Ander eta Yul.

Three directors have won this category and later have received the Best Director award, Alejandro Amenábar won for Tesis (1996) and went on to win Best Director twice, for The Others (2001) and The Sea Inside (2005); Fernando León de Aranoa won for Familia (1997) and later won Best Director thrice, for Barrio (1998), Mondays in the Sun (2002) and The Good Boss (2022); and Juan Antonio Bayona won for The Orphanage (2007) and went on to win Best Director twice, for The Impossible (2012) and A Monster Calls (2016).

Five films have won both this award and Best Film, Agustín Díaz Yanes's Nobody Will Speak of Us When We're Dead (1995), Alejandro Amenábar's Tesis (1996), Achero Mañas's Pellet (2000), Raúl Arévalo's The Fury of a Patient Man (2016) and Pilar Palomero's Schoolgirls (2020). Animator Enrique Gato became the first to historically win the award for an animated film with Tad, The Lost Explorer.

At the 40th Goya Awards, the academy announced changes in the eligibility criteria for the category, changing the nature of the debut work from first ICAA-assessed feature film to first feature film released in theatres.^[1]

In the following table, the years are listed as per Academy convention, and generally correspond to the year of film release; the ceremonies are always held the following year.