Lauren Wolkstein


Lauren Wolkstein is an American film director, writer, and editor. She is known for directing the 2017 drama-thriller The Strange Ones with Christopher Radcliff and serving on the directorial team for the third season of Ava DuVernay's Queen Sugar. A 2017-2018 Women at Sundance fellow, Wolkstein has been named a "New Face of Independent Film" by Filmmaker Magazine. Her films have screened at several festivals, including Cannes Film Festival, Outfest LGBT Film Festival,
Sundance Film Festival, and SXSW.
She is an Assistant Professor of Film and Media at Temple University in Philadelphia.

Early life and education

Wolkstein was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. The daughter of a schoolteacher and an Air Force Colonel, she grew up a short drive away from the amusement park where fellow Baltimorean John Waters staged part of his 1990 film, Cry-Baby. At 16, Wolkstein worked in coding for a Department of Defense agency where she was "the only female coder and the only teenager in the room." She was provided a security clearance that exceeded her war veteran father's. With David Lynch, Lukas Moodysson, and Waters serving as early inspirations, Wolkstein obtained a Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science and Film from Duke University in 2004, where she also won the school's Undergraduate Filmmaker Award. In 2010, she obtained a Masters of Fine Arts in Directing from Columbia University. While at Columbia, she say that she "fell in love with filmmakers like Hal Ashby and Nicholas Ray, who had a sensitivity to outsiders, odd couple pairings, and people on the fringes.”

Career

Wolkstein's School of the Arts thesis film, Cigarette Candy, won the Short Film Jury Award for Best Narrative Short at the 2010 SXSW Film Festival. Cigarette Candy was praised as "a strikingly honest portrayal of one teenage Marine's homecoming" by Short of the Week.
In 2017, Wolkstein and Radcliff adapted their intergenerational road trip short The Strange Ones into a feature-length film. The thriller gleaned mixed reviews, with Eric Kohn at IndieWire calling it “a bracing, unpredictable movie, building its disquieting suspense around unknown relationships and invisible threats” and Matt Zoeller Seitz at RogerEbert.com noting that The Strange Ones is "assembled like a jigsaw puzzle that one can 'solve,' immediately or gradually, but the characters are characters, human beings, and they suffer a bit from being treated as puzzles as well." In Artforum, John Waters named The Strange Ones one of his favorite movies of 2017.

Filmography

Film

Television