Emily Carmichael's
Illustration Portfolio

Emily Carmichael is a lifelong New Yorker. Her films, plays, paintings and comics address the divide between reality and fantasy, seeking to describe the world as it is--messy and sometimes disappointing--as well as what it can be: magical and endlessly surprising.

As a teenager, Emily contributed two essays, "Fight Girl Power" and "Acid Torches of Doom," to Ophelia Speaks, a collection of works by adolescent girls, which spent eighteen weeks on The New York Times Best Seller List. Salon's review of the book singled out her work as the strongest in the collection and she appeared as a guest on National Public Radio's Talk of Nation to discuss issues of girlhood and modernity. She graduated Stuyvesant High School in 2000 with medals in English and Physics, and recieved Bertelsmann's World of Expression award for her short story "Losing It."

At Harvard University, Emily earned her B.A. with honors in Painting and Literature and continued to distinguish herself as an artist, playwright, and theater director. She wrote and directed two full-length plays---Stopover and The Passion Sell (co-directed with Geordie Broadwater)---and three short plays---Amy's Roadside, The Impossibles, and The Minute Kings. She also co-directed Macbeth: The Puppet Shakespeare for which she designed and sculpted twenty-two clay puppets. Her comic strip, Whiz Kids, which debuted in her high school newspaper, ran in the Harvard Crimson over two years. Seth MacFarlane, writing in Noise magazine, praised its artistry and "Doonesbury rhythms." At Cambridge, her paintings and sculptures were regularly featured in student exhibitions and she graduated with the David McCord Prize for Excellence in the Arts.

After her graduation in 2004, Emily moved back to New York City where she began to work professionally as an artist and writer. She assisted with story development on One Rat Short (Short-listed for the 2006 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film), and wrote and workshopped her new play, Madrigal's Dome, at the Manhattan Theater Club. She also served as a graphic designer for several ad and promotional campaigns and as a set designer for the second season of the Babel Theater Project.

In 2006, she entered the MFA film program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and in the past two years has written and directed five narrative short films and an animated short in addition to two short documentaries. Emily's films have been shown at IFC, Avery Fischer Hall, and at Slamdance and South By Southwest as well as many other festivals. She is in her third year as a graduate student at NYU and is currently working on a feature thesis project, which she will write and direct.

Josh Hetzler, Founder and Managing Producer

Josh Hetzler is an award-winning Brooklyn-based independent film and theater producer, and the first MFA candidate at New York University’s prestigious Graduate Film Program to major exclusively in producing. He has worked with Maysles Films, Good Films, Kalal Films, PS Pictures, Synapse Productions, Wolf359 and Theater Askew. He was the principal NYC fundraiser for producer Sandi Dubowski on the feature documentary A Jihad for Love. Josh produced and wrote the film This is not my Beautiful Life, which premiered at the New Filmmaker’s Series at Anthology Film Archive and was acquired for distribution by Cinemanow. He produced the short film Siri Oko Fo, directed by Heather Murphy, which premiered at Cannes. His film Adelaide won the audience award at GenArt. Josh has produced seven other short films including No Such Place, Tiger, Rev, La Visitee, And The World Goes Round, and Harrow Island. His theatrical production credits include Rag, Fur, Blood, Bone: The Epic of Gilgamesh, and The IGNITE Theater Festival.

Josh’s undergraduate degree is in Dramatic Writing from NYU and he was a finalist for the 2007 Iowa Review Poetry prize. He has received awards and honors from NYU and the First Run Film Festival, as well as a level-one scholarship award from the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts. Josh’s films have screened festivals and theaters all over the world, including GenArt, IFC, Cannes, San Sebastian, and many others.

Since co-founding Kid Can Drive, Josh has produced KCD Films the Ghost and Us, which premiered at Cinevegas in June 2009, and Play/Stop, currently in post-production.

Katy Scoggin, Writer/Director

As a writer/director, Katy Scoggin looks for humor in life’s most mundane and humiliating corners. She tells smart, funny stories about perfectly decent people for whom everything goes horribly wrong…before going eventually right.

Though she considers herself a New Yorker, Katy was raised by evangelicals in a smoggy valley east of LA. After high school, as an exchange student in Germany, she lived with a dog breeder, experimented with primary hair colors, and learned a second language. She went on to pursue degrees in sculpture and German as a Mylonas Honorary Scholar at Washington University in St. Louis.

During her undergraduate studies, she spent semesters abroad in Italy and Germany, where she studied visual art, documentary filmmaking, and German cultural studies. She also directed and shot two short documentaries – one about Berlin’s Islamic headscarf debate, another about an Indian family’s love of food and struggle for identity – that transitioned her interest in film into a career aspiration.

As a Fulbright scholar in Berlin, Katy met three Turkish women who become the subjects of InsideOutsiders, a documentary about female Turkish-German identity. The project took Katy and her cinematographer, Anna Intemann, all over Turkish Berlin and into Istanbul and Eastern Anatolia.

Katy moved to New York in 2006. In film school at NYU, she made a fourth short documentary and wrote and directed four narrative shorts. She honed her skills in cinematography and shot seven of her colleagues’ shorts on film, HD, and DV. She spent her third year of coursework as a Graduate Assistant in Cinematography, a fellowship which allowed her to assistant teach camera classes, shoot films, and work closely with faculty members Tony Jannelli and Sandi Sissel, ASC.

Katy remains dedicated to writing and directing. In 2011, she will return briefly to the California wasteland to direct her NYU thesis film, a comedic short about a fossil and three people who have differing opinions about its origins. She plans to develop the story into her first feature film.