Anya Meksin '11 Writes for New Netflix Show, 'In From the Cold'

Alumna Anya Meksin ’11 served as a staff writer for the debut season of In From The Cold, a new series from Netflix. 

In from the Cold follows Jenny “Anya” Franklin, an American single mom and ex-Russian spy who must juggle family life and unique shape-shifting skills in a battle against an insidious enemy. The show premiered on January 28, 2022.

“Being part of the writers room for In from the Cold was a very collaborative and joyful experience,” Meksin said. “This was due in large part to the generous spirit of showrunner Adam Glass, who taught me so much, and the other wonderful writers and support staff, who each made an indelible contribution to the series.”

In addition to writing episode five of the first season, entitled “An Old Friend,” part of Meksin’s job was serving as an advisor regarding the authenticity of the Russian storyline. “I am particularly proud of the way the series hired real Russian actors to play these roles in their native tongue—something that is still incredibly rare in film and TV,” Meksin said.

Meksin also had a hand in one of the biggest parts of the show—the protagonist’s name: “People have commented on the fact that the main character is also named Anya, and I must admit that I brought that on myself by suggesting that the original name—Nadia—was too commonly used by English speakers when writing Eastern European women,” Meskin said. “The next day I came into the writers room to find that all mentions of Nadia had been replaced with ‘Anya’ on our white boards.”

Stream the first season of In from the Cold on Netflix now.

Anya Meksin was born in the former USSR and immigrated to the US as an asylum-seeking refugee. She earned a BA from Yale and an MFA from Columbia, where her sci-fi thesis film Temma won Faculty Selects and an Alfred P. Sloan grant before screening at the Museum of the Moving Image, the National Academy of Sciences, and festivals worldwide. Her comedy short Berated Woman was nationally broadcast on Out TV and the Logo Network, and she was commissioned by the Open Society Institute to create Balka, a documentary about the HIV epidemic in Eastern Europe, which has over 4 million views online. 

Meksin’s sci-fi script Taminex was selected for labs and fellowships at Film Independent, IFP, ScreenCraft, and the Black List / Women in Film. Her script The Algorithm was commissioned by Gidden Media, and she is currently developing several film and TV projects in genres that include crime, horror, sci-fi, and fantasy. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband William Gerrard and their son Neri.