Beginning Screenwriting

Dr. Susan Steinberg is a screenwriter and filmmaker of internationally screened and televised films. Her films and film excerpts Lulu in Berlin (with Richard Leacock) and Our Time in the Garden (with Ron Blau)have been broadcast nationally on PBS, and internationally by the BBC (Great Britain), Antenne Deux (France), NDR (Germany), ABC Australia, and RIA (Italy). Among other festivals, Steinberg's films have been screened at the Telluride Film Festival; Festival d'Automne, Paris; Directors' Guild of America; the Berlin Film Festival; and the San Francisco Erotic Film Festival. Our Time in the Garden won a Massachusetts Artists' Fellowship Grant and was selected by the American Film Institute for a national touring program. Lulu in Berlin is distributed on DVD by Criterion Collections (2006). Her film script treatment, Mistaken Identity, was an invited submission and a finalist in the Sundance Screenwriting Competition. She was awarded a bi-centennial film production grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Steinberg has worked on sponsored film production projects—among them Frank Stella at the Fogg (Harvard University), Private Universe (Smithsonian Institute of Astrophysics), and Joan Robinson: One Woman's Story, which won the Dupont Award for excellence in non-print journalism. She was trained in film production at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) film/video section and holds a PhD in comparative film studies from Boston University (1996). Steinberg is teaching screenwriting in the Harvard Extension School and was a guest lecturer on scriptwriting the art and science of time travel at MIT in collaboration with Michele Reilly and Seth Lloyd. She is writing a book and companion lecture series on the screenwriting process.