Christina Lazaridi, Lewis Center for the Arts

Lecturer in Creative Writing

About

Christina Lazaridi is an Academy Award nominated screenwriter and an expert in dynamic story design and audience response. Projects she has authored, or actively developed, have won awards at Cannes and Berlin Film Festivals, Oberhousen, Serajevo Film Festival, Sundance, SXSW and the Ariels (Mexican Oscars), among many others. She currently serves as Head of the Screenwriting Concentration and Assistant Professor of Practice at Columbia University’s Graduate Film Division. She formerly served as Associate Director and full-time Lecturer at Princeton University’s Creative Writing Program where she built the program’s screenwriting track and conducted pioneer research with Princeton’s Neuroscience Institute. In addition to her own screenwriting career, Christina has extensively mentored international filmmakers through her private consulting practice as well as through affiliations with major film festivals, (Sundance Co//ab, Toronto International Film Festival, etc.) writing programs (Emerson, CUNY, StonyBrook) and multiple production companies. Lazaridi is the director of studies at the Mediterranean Film Institute and the co-founder and board member of the script development think-tank Cine Qua Non Labs in Mexico, which was recently awarded a FilmCraft grant from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Her three books on screenwriting methodology were commissioned and published by the Mediterranean Film Institute and European Union’s Creative Europe Program.

Lazaridi’s personal written work focuses on high emotional-impact narratives of dislocation and survival and her performance-centered screenplays have consistently attracted major collaborators both domestically and abroad: Her most recent feature film, Nobody’s Watching, (co-written with director J. Solomonoff) premiered in the International Competition section of the Tribeca Film Festival where it won the top acting award. Nobody’s Watching went on to be released internationally to wide critical acclaim, becoming a New York Times critic’s pick and was nominated in six categories for the esteemed 2018 Silver Condor Awards where Lazaridi and Solomonoff won for best original screenplay. Her first short film One Day Crossing (dir. Joan Stein) was a Student Academy Award winner and a nominee in the Live Action Short Category. Her first feature film Coming Up Roses (co-written with dir. L. Albright) starred Broadway icon Bernadette Peters and Rachel Brosnahan and her historical feature documentary Varian and Putzi: A 20th Century Tale, directed by Academy Award winner Richard Kaplan, was released theatrically at the Museum of Modern Art. In 2017 Christina’s first produced screenplay in Greece, Rosa of Smyrna, was a box office sensation surpassing all international sales. Christina is currently writing a feature screenplay for French Production Company Pan-Europeenne, and a new project for New York-based producer Joslyn Barnes and Louverture Films. Her TV sci-fi pilot Escape Attempt was shot in Poland in the fall of 2019 and is currently in post-production. Lazaridi’s scientific paper on narrative, memory and the human brain, co-authored with Uri Hasson’s Neuroscience Lab, will be published by MIT’S Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience in 2021.

Christina Lazaridi holds a BA (Honors) from Princeton University and and MFA (Honors) from Columbia’s Graduate Film Division.