Kryssa Schemmerling

Kryssa Schemmerling received her M.F.A. in Film from Columbia University School of the Arts where she co-wrote, co-directed and co-produced a Student Academy Award-winning short film, Gold Mountain (1991). She has since co-written and co-directed two other narrative shorts. The First Seven Years (1998), starring Israel Horovitz and Carol Kane, screened nationally on PBS, while her latest award-winning short, The West Begins at Fifth Avenue (2013), screened at festivals here and abroad. She also directed and produced a feature-length documentary, Our Hawaii (2010), with funding from the New York State Council on the Arts. In 2016, her first book, Iris In, a collection of poems about films and cinema history, was published by Broadstone Books. Her work has been published widely in literary journals and nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Ms. Schemmerling has taught screenwriting at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and Montclair State University in New Jersey, and currently teaches screenwriting at the Barry R. Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema at Brooklyn College.