Lori Bowen

Lori Bowen was born in North Canton, Ohio, and moved to Sarasota, Florida, ten years later. Although she showed a proclivity for writing and performing at an early age, she didn't consider a career in the arts until, when in sixth grade, she became the editor for Brookside Middle School's weekly ten minute show called "Campus Views." Her love for the horror genre started when she saw the movie Cujo at the tender age of six and her mother had to explain to her terrified daughter the magic of special effects. From that not-so-gentle stepping stone, Lori moved on to Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street, George A. Romero's Dead Cycle, and Lucio Fulci's Gates of Hell (at the age of 10!) When she was 12, Lori wrote her first feature-length screenplay called A Nightmare on Elm Street 7: The Last Dance. While this was never a screenplay that would be produced, it instilled in her one simple idea: she could do it, too. Around that time, Lori was bitten by the acting bug and when it came time to go to high school, she auditioned for, and got into, both the Theatre and Radio/Television/Film programmes at the Booker High School of the Visual and Performing Arts. Lori chose Radio/Television/ Film as it offered an education in every part of the creative process, including acting. During this time, her love of the horror genre was discouraged and the message was clear: no self-respecting filmmaker, especially a woman, wants to be in the redheaded stepchild genre of the Industry. Luckily, in her tenure with the Radio/Television/Film department, she learned she wasn't a very good actress, which was a relief; she enjoyed writing and directing far more than being in front of the camera. She also learned some very hard lessons within the school's microcosm Industry, but instead of breaking her, they made her more determined to make it and to go as far as she can on her terms. Unlike most directors, Lori hasn't graduated from film school or college. She had one semester of film education at Manatee Community College in Florida under the direction of Del Jacobs. That one semester taught Lori more about filmmaking than four years at Booker, but her real education comes from hands-on experience and observation of her favourite films. Eventually, Lori realized that she only felt truly comfortable writing and directing horror films and her first post-school short, "Without/Within," won the Director's Choice Award at the ShockerFest International Film Festival in 2008. In 2010, when Anathema was rejected from the mainstream Sarasota festival, Lori fell in with a group of filmmakers also rejected from that festival who called themselves the Fringe and their outlet was the Sarasota Fringe Film Festival. She was hired to edit together two flagship documentaries: the first one was about a traveling circus and charitable organization called Circus Sarasota and the other was about one of Sarasota's founders, a woman named Bertha Palmer. For her efforts, Lori was awarded two Colson awards, one for her editing work on Circus Sarasota and the other as a group award for the extremely well-received A Conversation with Bertha Palmer. A Hammer Fell in Jerusalem: Anathema is, itself, an award-winning film, having been given a medal in the Best Sci-Fi Short category at the Indie Gathering in Cleveland, Ohio. It's also played at the Central Florida Film Festival in Ocoee, Florida, the Vampire Film Festival in New Orleans, Louisiana in a Gothic Shorts programme, the Female Shorts Film Festival in Alexandria, Virginia, and in the Sarasota Fringe Film Festival. She also has a music video she made for her brother's new band, World Collision, played in the Summer 2010 program at New Filmmakers in New York and was nominated for Best Cinematography and Best Alternative Rock at the World Music and Independent Film Festival.