Jan Eliasberg is a director, screenwriter, and novelist. Eliasberg’s original script W.A.S.P. tells the story of the female pilots who, for the first time in history, trained to fly military aircraft. Eliasberg’s The Gemcutter is a magical family film, a fairy tale in the tradition of A Little Princess. Eliasberg has written two music-driven films: Mi Corazon for New Line with Jennifer Lopez attached and Heart ‘N Soul (Jerry Weintraub, producer) for Warner Brothers.

Eliasberg holds an MFA in Directing from the Yale School of Drama, where she directed some of the greatest American actors of her generation: Frances McDormand, Angela Bassett, Tony Shalhoub, Paul Giamatti, and John Turturro. She mounted critically-acclaimed productions of Macbeth, Aristophanes’ The Birds, the American premiere of Brecht’s Saint Joan of the Stockyards, and Ibsen’s Peer Gynt at the Public Theatre, the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York City, Yale Repertory Theatre, and South Coast Rep.

Eliasberg began directing film as the recipient of a grant from the American Film Institute’s Directing Workshop for Women. Her film The Doctor, starring Lukas Haas, won many festival awards and attracted the attention of Michael Mann, who hand-picked Eliasberg to be the first woman to direct the iconic Miami Vice, as well as Crime Story.

Eliasberg was producer, writer, and director of the acclaimed NBC/Warner Brothers series Sisters. She created the dramatic series Special Investigations for ABC/Warner Brothers, and the dramatic series Spirit of St. Louis for CBS. She has directed pilots for one-hour dramatic series for CBS, ABC, and NBC, as well the film Past Midnight starring Rutger Hauer, Natasha Richardson, and Clancy Brown for New Line and USA Network. Jan has won the Dorothy Arzner Award, the NAACP Award, and the Imagen Award.

Ms. Eliasberg’s novel Travelling Light received the Frances Ford Coppola Fiction Fellowship and the Jakobsen Fellowship for Fiction. Eliasberg is currently adapting Travelling Light for the screen. She has had non-fiction articles published in California Magazine, Los Angeles Magazine, and LA Weekly.

Eliasberg has taught fiction and film at USC, UCLA, the Bennington Writer’s Conference, the Wesleyan Writer’s Conference, and was a guest artist at the Sundance Institute. She has worked as a consultant for the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts.