Andy Bienen

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).