Writing for Film & Television Full Time Faculty
What are Full-Time Faculty saying about the new three-year MFA in Writing for Film and Television?
Andy Bienen
Associate Professor of Professional Practice
Reduced Teaching Load
Andy Bienen has an MFA in Film from Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where his feature screenplay “Wankers” won the Best Screenplay Award at the 1996 Polo/Ralph Lauren Columbia University Film Festival. He co-wrote (with director Kimberly Peirce) the Academy Award winning film Boys Don’t Cry (1999), which also won the Best Screenplay Award at the Stockholm Film Festival and the Best Screenwriter Prize at the Young Hollywood Awards. In 2019, Boys Don’t Cry was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. Bienen’s recent projects have included the short story, “Fort Wilderness,” which was published in Ploughshares in 2018, the story for the film Yellow Rose (2019), and a screenplay based on Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed. written for director Debra Granik. In addition to teaching screenwriting at Columbia, Professor Bienen has also taught at New York University, the New School and La Femis (Paris).
This is a thrilling time to be a dramatic storyteller in a visual medium. The industry continues to evolve and expand, with feature films finding new forms and structures, and even being adapted into television series, and with television itself evolving in all directions. There are so many opportunities for employment in the industry and for creative innovation…In our new program, we will help you develop your craft, expand your ideas about what stories can be, and give you the creative and professional skills to write your own stories and launch your careers.
Katherine Dieckmann
Concentration Head, Screenwriting, Fall 2023
Professor of Professional Practice
Writer-director Katherine Dieckmann has made four feature films, most recently Strange Weather (2016), starring Holly Hunter and Carrie Coon. Dieckmann’s previous features include Motherhood (2009), starring Uma Thurman, Minnie Driver and Anthony Edwards; Diggers (2007), starring Paul Rudd, Sarah Paulson, Maura Tierney, and Josh Hamilton; and A Good Baby (2000), with Henry Thomas, David Strathairn and Cara Seymour, which she developed at the Sundance Institute’s Screenwriting and Directing labs.
Dieckmann began her career as a journalist, writing on film, books and music for such publications as Rolling Stone, Vogue, The Village Voice and The New York Times Book Review, before going on to direct videos for bands including R.E.M., Aimee Mann, Wilco, and, more recently, Sharon Van Etten, for whom she made two clips in 2018. She was the originating director on the groundbreaking live action Nickelodeon series The Adventures of Pete & Pete, building a body of directing work in episodic television while continuing to publish nonfiction articles and essays in numerous books and periodicals.
As a Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia University’s graduate School of the Arts Film Program, Dieckmann has taught Screenwriting for over two decades, mentoring countless filmmakers. She has also been a Creative Advisor for The Sundance Institute, the IFP/Narrative Features Lab, and the Nantucket Screenwriters Colony. Dieckmann is Creative Director for Divergent Pictures, which produces socially engaged content across all genres and platforms. She is currently developing the feature film Her Bright Shadow, and a limited series, “Shavertown,” based on Lucy Sante’s Nineteen Reservoirs.
Dieckmann holds a B.A. in English from Vassar College, where she graduated magna and summa cum laude, and an M.A. in English from New York University.
Writing is at the heart of so much of what we do at Columbia. Our program overall has always valued that practice and skill set as an essential building block upon which all other skills should be built. It’s no accident that so many of our colleagues in Directing are also writers of their own material, and that our Creative Producing cohort emphasize work in writing as a major component to advancing successfully in the industry. Our stand-alone writing track distills and focuses a practice that is already an integral part of how we operate in the Film Program, and is indeed part of the very air we collectively breathe. I’m so excited that my colleagues and I can bring the wealth of our shared experience to the table, offering a select group of strong creative minds this unique opportunity to rigorously hone their skills in feature and episodic writing, then help launch their distinct voices into the wider world.
Trey Ellis
Professor of Professional Practice
Trey Ellis is a two-time Emmy and Peabody winning filmmaker, American Book Award winning novelist, and NAACP Image award winning playwright. His screenplay Holy Mackerel! is one of the highest ever rated on Franklin Leonard’s Black List.com. He is currently developing this project as a limited series for the FX network with Shaka King and starring Samuel L. Jackson. Some of his other screenplays include the Peabody Award-winning The Tuskegee Airmen for HBO and Good Fences for Showtime, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was shortlisted for the PEN award for Best Teleplay. His works have been screened at the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. He is the author of the novels, Platitudes, Home Repairs and Right Here, Right Now, as well as the memoir Bedtime Stories: Adventures in the Land of Single-Fatherhood. His essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ and Vanity Fair. His play, Fly, was commissioned by the Lincoln Center Institute and continues to be performed around the country including Washington, D.C.’s Ford’s Theater, the Pasadena Playhouse and the New Victory Theater in New York. He is currently in rehearsals for a musical on the life of Dorothy Dandridge for which he wrote the book and is co-writer of the lyrics. A night of the music from the musical was performed at Carnegie Hall this summer.
My brilliant colleagues and I all believe in our bones that “storytelling is storytelling” and we’re looking for creative, curious, open-minded artists with stories they’re burning to tell. We seek out and encourage a diversity of skill sets and interests because it is vital to us that we help you come into your own voice as a professional storyteller, not following the trends, but breaking new ground.
Jamal Joseph
Professor of Professional Practice
On leave Spring 2024
Jamal Joseph is two-time recipient of the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame Prized Pieces Award, a New Foundation of the Arts Fellowship, a recipient of the Paul Robeson Award from the Actors Equity Association, a best song Academy Award Nominee, and an alum of the Sundance Directing Lab.
His film Chapter & Verse (theatrical and BET) won the Pan African Film Festival Audience Choice Award and was a New York Times Critic’s pick. Jamal’s writing and directing credits include “Drive” by and “Da Zone” for STARZ in BLACK, “Hard Chorus” and “Hip Hop in the Promised Land” for Comedy Central, and “Hughes Dream Harlem” for PBS. Additional screenplay credits include Knights of the South for A&E and Ali: An American Hero for Fox. Jamal is a producer and is featured in the upcoming FX docuseries Dear Mama about the life and legacy of Tupac and Afeni Shakur. Jamal is featured in the PBS documentary Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution and the EPIX docuseries Godfather of Harlem. He is the author of Tupac Legacy and his memoir Panther Baby, which he is developing as a dramatic series for STARZ.
I am very excited about what will happen when we combine the amazing creative accomplishments and educational experience of our faculty with the talent, diversity and enthusiasm of the students selected for this program. The screen and television writing craft learned, and the stories told will -in the words of Muhammad Ali, “shake up the world!”
David Klass
Concentration Co-Head, Television Writing
Associate Professor of Professional Practice
David Klass has written more than forty feature screenplays for the major Hollywood Studios including Kiss the Girls (starring Morgan Freeman), Desperate Measures (starring Michael Keaton), Walking Tall (starring The Rock), and Emperor (starring Tommy Lee Jones).
In the world of TV, David wrote the Showtime movie In the Time of the Butterflies (starring Selma Hayak, based on the novel by Julia Alvarez), Runaway Virus (starring Paige Turco, based on an article by Malcolm Gladwell), and has worked as a writer and producer on Law & Order: Criminal Intent (starring Jeff Goldblum) and developed numerous shows for the networks including Austen's Razor (developed by CBS in 2014, ABC in 2015).
David has also written twenty novels, including most recently Out of Time, (Dutton/Penguin, 2020) which was optioned for a movie by Netflix with David doing the adaptation.
This new opportunity for writers at Columbia could not be more exciting. I co-run TV Writing with Blair Singer and we are keenly aware that many of our students' first jobs will come in the world of TV. I try to draw from my writing experiences in features, TV writing, and novels to help students understand how to create complex characters, dramatic structure built around conflict, and to graduate from Columbia’s writing program with real world knowledge about what’s happening now in TV that will allow them to quickly get representation and first jobs in this exciting industry.
Christina Lazaridi
Assistant Professor of Professional Practice
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 (Camera D' Or) and Berlin Film Festivals (Golden Bear), Sundance, SXSW and the Ariels (Mexican Oscars), among others. Her work as a development expert for award-winning properties was recognized in 2019 and 2020 by a grant to the organization she co-founded, Cine Qua Non Lab, from the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences.
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. She is the director of studies at the Mediterranean Film Institute and her three books on screenwriting methodology were commissioned and published by the MFI and European Union’s Creative Europe Program.
Prior to her position at Columbia, Christina 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 on storytelling and the brain with Princeton’s Neuroscience Institute and Uri Hasson's Lab. Results of their research were published by MIT's Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience in 2021.
Born and raised in Greece in a family of Asia Minor refugees and artists, 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 domestically and abroad. 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 starred Broadway icon Bernadette Peters and introduced Rachel Brosnahan, and her historical feature documentary Varian and Putzi: A 20th Century Tale was directed by Academy Award winner Richard Kaplan and 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.
Her most recent feature, 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 Silver Condor Awards where Lazaridi and Solomonoff won for best original screenplay.
Current projects include TV series Escape Attempt, based on the Strugatsky brothers Soviet sci-fi novels, (in collaboration with Grammy Award winning company Aggressive TV) and Femen, a dramatic biopic of the Ukrainian activist movement (written for dir. Darya Zhuk, produced by Pan-Europeenne and Arthouse Traffic).
Christina holds an MFA with Honors from Columbia University's Graduate Film Division and a BA with Honors from Princeton University.
I am incredibly excited to bring my widespread experience mentoring award-winning international content to our new Writer's cohort. As a screenwriter, developing and writing film properties for international teams, I am passionate about supporting the uniqueness of each writer's voice, and unveiling the path to communicate that to the broadest audience available. My colleagues and I work seamlessly together to design the appropriate experience for each of our students and our versatile teaching styles give our writers a robust preparation in building technique while simultaneously unveiling the joy of process and creative discovery; essential to a fulfilling, long-lasting career.
Blair Singer
Concentration Co-Head, Television Writing
Concentration Head, Screenwriting, Spring 2024
Associate Professor of Professional Practice
Blair Singer is an Emmy-nominated New York-based television writer and playwright. Most recently, he served as the Co-Executive Producer on the final season of Bull on CBS. Prior to that, he was the Co-Executive Producer on the Fox TV show, Filthy Rich, starring Kim Cattrall. He was the Supervising Producer on the Netflix show, What / If, created by Mike Kelley and starring Renée Zellweger, and was the showrunner of the Mark Gordon-produced Youth & Consequences for YouTube Premium, which received a digital Emmy nomination for Best Drama. Other television credits include Weeds, Monk, The Mysteries of Laura, Fairly Legal, Beauty & The Beast, Memphis Beat, Rizzoli & Isles, and The Book of Daniel.
As a playwright, Blair’s satirical play, Matthew Modine Saves the Alpacas, starring Matthew Modine, Peri Gilpin, and French Stewart, was seen at The Geffen Theatre. Other productions include Notice Me at The Wild Project, NYC; The Most Damaging Wound and Meg’s New Friend at Manhattan Theatre Source, NYC; Placement at The Black Dahlia, Los Angeles. He is a frequent contributor to the 24-Hour Plays Viral Monologue series.
Blair created the digital series The Suffersons starring Michael Chernus (Severance) and Susan Pourfar (Tribes). The Suffersons premiered on rocketboom.com and was that site’s first fictionalized content. He was also a writer for the third season of “lonelygirl15.” Blair has consulted on several advertising campaigns, including Coca-Cola’s “Make it Possible Project” with John Chu.
As an educator, Blair taught for many years with DreamYard, an arts education program centered in the Bronx. With DreamYard, Blair taught drama at The Bronx Academy of Letters and founded their Drama Club. Blair was also the Artistic Director of the Bronx Acting Ensemble, a conservatory-style training program for Bronx teens. Blair is currently an Associate Professor of Television Studies at Columbia University and is the Co-Head of the TV Writing Concentration.
He is a graduate of the Juilliard School of Drama and a recipient of the Edgerton Prize.
With the pressing need for content—in 2020, there were 530 scripted shows across multiple platforms, up from 485 in 2019—there is a hunger for new, unique voices. This appetite has given rise to a voracious, aggressive search for previously unknown writers to bring their personal stories to the small screen to attract a previously untapped market. Content outlets are increasingly willing to take a chance on younger writers with a strong point of view. This rise of streaming and cross-platform viewing has become an ever-expanding frontier of opportunity and my colleagues and I are wholly committed and determined to prepare our students to enter into this evolving industry with the training, information, and craft skills, and self-assurance necessary to achieve lasting success.