Joan Kron

Joan Kron is 89 and this is her first film. For the past 25 years, Joan was contributing editor at large of Allure magazine, where she literally invented the plastic-surgery beat, winning more than a dozen journalism awards and the respect of surgeons and readers around the world. Her career path to filmmaking has been unorthodox, to say the least. In 1948, at age 20, she graduated from the Yale School of Drama, where she majored in Costume Design. She went on to pass the exam for the United Scenic Artists Union and was one of the first costume designers hired by NBC-TV, when TV was black-and-white and live. In 1950, after marrying a general surgeon in Philadelphia, she began shaking up that staid city. She was a founder of and eventually chairman of the Arts Council of the YM/YWHA, a group of women who brought avant-garde cultural events to the city. Joan is remembered as a force behind the first East Coast exhibit in the US of Pop Art in 1962, and the shocking visit to Philly in 1966 of Andy Warhol, who arrived with a program of underground films and the musical group, the Velvet Underground. Meanwhile, in partnership with a friend, Joan was producing limited editions of multiples by the artists Robert Indiana and Roy Lichtenstein -that can be found today in the top museums-- and spearheaded a movement to put art on billboards while Congress was trying to get them off highways. At age 41, after a personal tragedy, Joan began writing, almost by accident, and proved to be a natural, moving swiftly from Philadelphia magazine to New York, to The New York Times (covering design), and The Wall Street Journal (covering fashion). Her 1978 design book, co-authored with Suzanne Slesin, titled High-Tech, literally put the then-obscure term in the language and, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, gave it new meaning. Around 2012, with almost 1000 articles and four books under her belt, Joan was inspired to try her hand at film after auditing a course in social-documentary filmmaking at the School of Visual Arts NYC. She understands how rare it is to have a successful first film, and credits the appeal of Take My Nose...Please! to her collaboration with the many talented people who believed in her.