Yvette Biro

Yvette Biro Ph.D. - essayist, screenwriter, and Professor Emeritus at New York University Graduate Film School (NYU).

Her early books on the aesthetics of film were first published in her native Hungary, which became handbooks for film-schools in the country. Meanwhile, she worked on a dozen of prizewinning films with noted directors (Miklós Jancsó, Zoltán Fábri, Károly Makk). She was both the founder and the Editor-in-Chief of Filmkultura, the magazine of the democratic opposition.

In the mid 1970s, she was "offered" the chance to emigrate by the Hungarian authorities. After teaching at the Sorbonne in Paris, she moved to the US to teach at the Universities of Berkeley and Stanford, California. In 1982 she was hired as a professor then became Full Professor on the faculty of the Tisch School of the Arts (Film and TV Graduate Division) at NYU where she worked until her retirement in 2007. During these years, she was often invited as Visiting Professor to various universities, for instance the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, the Sorbonne in Paris, FEMIS in Paris, Centro Sperimentale in Rome, the University of Hong Kong, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Rai University in New Delhi.

She regularly held workshops and master-classes in screen-writing in Bombay, Budapest, the Dominican Republic, Harare (Zimbabwe), Havanna (Cuba), Istanbul, Ljubljana, Jyvaskyle (Finland), Prague, Sarajevo, Tokyo, Toronto, Zagreb, etc.

She has written books on film which have been translated into several languages. Her numerous essays have been published in professional magazines internationally – Film Quarterly, Études Cinématographiques , Performing Arts Journal, Bianco & Nero, Dædalus, Millennium, The Village Voice, etc., on online magazines such as Rouge and the Unspoken Journal.

Theory and criticism

• 1982 - Profane Mythology: The Savage Mind of the Cinema, Indiana University Press
• 2008 - Turbulence and Flow in Film, Indiana University Press

Scripts

• 1995 - Arrivals and Departures (film, unproduced) - winner of the European Script Fund Award
• 2003 - The Stone Raft (film)
• 2006 - Johanna (film)
• 2008 - Delta (film) - winner of the FIPRESCI Prize in Cannes
• 2010 - Tender Son
• 2009 - Judasevangelium, with Kornél Mundruczó (opened at the Hamburg Thalia Theatre in September 2009)
• 2007/2008 - The Frankenstein Project (European tour including Brussels, Paris, Vienna)

After spending more than 25 years in New York, she has now re-established herself in Paris.