Lisanne Sartor is an award-winning writer/director whose short film SIX LETTER WORD has screened at over fifty-five film festivals worldwide, including the Telluride Film Festival. She made that short via the AFI Directing Workshop for Women. She was awarded a renowned Hedgebrook Writers Residency in 2016 and was a 2016 WGA Feature Writers Access Project Honoree. In 2017, she was one of twenty-five women chosen for the first year of the exclusive AFI/Fox Bridge Program, designed to increase the number of women working on studio films. Her feature script, SIX LETTER WORD, based on her short film, won the 2017 Drama Category of the Script Pipeline First Look Project. She will direct that feature in 2018 with Tani Cohen producing. She’s directed five shorts total and is prepping a webseries to shoot soon.

Lisanne moved to Los Angeles to be a writer/director after graduating Yale but got waylaid from writing and directing when she was admitted to the DGA Assistant Director Training Program. She quickly discovered that, although assistant directing doesn’t necessarily lead to directing, it’s good training for any aspect of filmmaking.

She left ADing after seven years to get an MFA in Screenwriting from UCLA, where she won numerous screenwriting awards, including the Samuel Goldwyn. Her original screenplay, “Cleaverville” was produced by Alexander/Enright Productions and aired on Lifetime. She’s written an MOW for the DeAngelis Group in Italy, had a script optioned by Hearst Entertainment, and developed projects with Roth-Arnold Productions and other companies. She teaches screenwriting at UCLA, Stephens College and the AFI DWW, and has been CineStory’s Board President and Creative Director, Mentorship since 2009, and a CineStory board member since 2004.

Photo by Rayme Silverberg