About Kiran

Kiran Kaur Saini was born in Napa, California, to a United Nations forest economist from India and an unsuspecting New Yorker who took his class in the Urdu language at the New School on a whim.

Encouraged to read by both of them from an early age, Kiran began writing at the age of 8 and made the decision to "get serious" at age 12. She spent most of high school apprenticed to the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble in Pennsylvania and wrote plays and a lot of really moody poems and actually published some of them while majoring in music composition at Smith College.

After college, she decided to get more practical and began publishing short stories, winning the Henfield Prize and receiving a Pushcart Prize nomination from Joyce Carol Oates. She received her MFA in writing from Sarah Lawrence College, and while there was a quarterfinalist in the Chesterfield Film Writers Competition. Her final grad school adventure was a PhD in the literature of Film and Drama at University of Louisiana in Lafayette.

Kiran currently writes screenplays and short fiction and following Hurricane Katrina relocated (or escaped) from New Orleans to Los Angeles. Her script for the 30-minute film The Lesson was produced in 2007, and the film won the top prize, Best Narrative Film, at the Women's International Film Festival in Miami.

Kiran has worked as a video editor, information technology specialist and database application developer, university creative writing teacher, and most recently, as a script supervisor. For the past 2 years, she has also taught digital script supervising in the private classes of Randi Feldman and as a guest lecturer at UCLA.

digital script supervisor, digital script supervising, digital script notes