Michael Almereyda

Michael Almereyda, an American film director, screenwriter, and film producer, was born on April 7, 1959, and studied art history at Harvard. Despite his early departure from Harvard, Almereyda pursued filmmaking and secured a Hollywood agent based on a spec script about Nikola Tesla. His filmmaking career began with a self-financed, black-and-white short, 'A Hero of Our Time', which screened in the 1992 Sundance Film Festival. Apart from directing, he authored early screenplays, including Cherry 2000 (1987) and the first draft for Wim Wenders' 'Until the End of the World' (1991).

Almereyda's films span many genres, styles, and formats, with his first feature being a mid-Western family comedy, Twister (1989), based on Mary Robison's novel Oh. His other works range from a romantic chamber piece, 'Another Girl Another Planet (1992)', to a comic vampire film, Nadja (1994), to an adaptation of 'Hamlet' (2000) layered with a contemporary New York setting on Shakespeare's text. He ventured into documentary and short films, one of which, 'William Eggleston in the Real World' (2005), received a nomination for a Gotham Award for Best Documentary. Most recently, Almereyda directed a documentary on Hampton Fancher and adapted his Tesla spec script into a 2020 film of the same name. He is also renowned for his written criticism and commentary across various media platforms, and received the Moving Image Creative Capital Award in 2015.