Christina Lazaridi

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 a nominee 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), Cost of Living, a film about the iconic women's movement in Brazil (co-written with director Moara Passoni, and co-produced with Sophia Geld and Maria Farinha Films, Brazil) and Femen, a dramatic biopic of the Ukrainian activist movement (written for dir. Darya Zhuk, produced by Zephyr Films, UK, Pan-Europeennee, France and Arthouse Traffic, Ukraine).

Christina holds an MFA with Honors from Columbia University's Graduate Film Division and a BA with Honors from Princeton University.