Christina Lazaridi

Christina Lazaridi (born 1970) is a Greek-American screenwriter and university lecturer. In 2001, she and Joan Stein Schimke co-wrote the screenplay for the award-winning short film One Day Crossing (starring Hungarian actors Erika Marozsan and Attila Szatmári).

Early life and education

Lazaridi was born in 1970 in Thessaloniki, Greece. Her mother, Ioanna Manoledaki, worked as a set and costume designer for theater and opera. Lazaridi's brother, George-Emmanuel Lazaridis, is a composer.

Lazaridi studied comparative literature and creative writing at Princeton University. Her lecturers included Paul Muldoon and James Richardson. She received her bachelor's degree in 1992. The following year she enrolled in screenwriting at Columbia University, graduating in 1998 with an MFA degree.

Career

In 2000, together with Joan Stein Schimke, Lazaridi wrote the script for One Day Crossing, a short film about the fate of a Jew in Hungary at the time of the Second World War.

In the meantime, she taught at various universities, including Screenwriting at the Mediterranean Film Institute in Athens, Greece, and creative writing at Princeton University, New Jersey. She also wrote books on the topics she taught.

In 2009, she co-founded Cine Qua Non Lab in Mexico, an organization that supports independent filmmakers. In 2011, Lazaridi and Richard Kaplan co-wrote the screenplay for a documentary titled Varian & Putzi: A 20th Century Tale. In 2016, she was one of the writers for Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovic's short drama film The Last Day of Charley E. Rays starring Len Cariou and Maryann Plunkett.

Lazaridi's most recent writing work was for the Argentinian actor/director Julia Solomonoff's drama Nobody's Watching starring Guillermo Pfening, Rafael Ferro, Paola Baldion, and Mayte Montero.