Named as one of Filmmaker Magazine’s ’25 New Faces of Independent Film,’ and a fellow of IFP’s 2011 Emerging Visions symposium, Danielle Lurie is a New York City based filmmaker and photographer. She has been shooting films and photos since graduating from Stanford University in 2000 with a BA in Philosophy. With her photography often being a by-product of her filmmaking, Danielle’s images are born of real moments and happenstance.
Danielle’s debut short film, In the Morning, premiered at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, and has won nine film festivals to date including ‘Best Narrative Short’ at the Oscar qualifying Nashville Film Festival. In November 2005, In The Morning was invited to screen before the U.S. Congress at the Congressional Human Rights Caucus on Honor Killings, and later screened before UNIFEM (United Nations Development Fund for Women). Right after In The Morning, Danielle made the short impromptu documentary 81-Year-Old Sweethearts, about an 81-year-old man she randomly met on a plane who was flying across the country to re-meet his high school sweetheart after 62 years – which was featured on YouTube’s homepage due to the high numbers of hits the video got.
Since In The Morning, Danielle has co-directed a documentary in Uganda where she lived in an IDP (Internally Displaced People) Camp and has directed a feature length documentary following Sheryl Crow’s Global Warming tour through the deep south, produced by Laurie David (An Inconvenient Truth). On the narrative side, Danielle has written screenplay adaptations of Jamaica Kincaid’s novel, Lucy, to star Zoe Saldana (Avatar, Star Trek) as well as an excerpt of Nicholas Kristof’s best selling book, Half the Sky, directed by Marisa Tomei and Lisa Leone, for a PBS series. Danielle is also adapting another Nicholas Kristof NY Times article into a full-length screenplay that she will direct titled Usha, set in the slums of India. She is also attached to direct the film adaptation of Marina Budhos’s book Ask Me No Questions, produced by Jane Startz. Danielle is currently writing the feature-length version of In the Morning, titled Fortunate Sons, that will co-star Emily Watson (Breaking the Waves, Punch Drunk Love), which she will direct in 2011.