Ela Thier's credits include The Wedding Cow (writer), garnering eighteen international
awards, including four Best-Feature and four Audience-Choice awards; Foreign Letters (writer-director), currently in post-production; and Puncture (story), a film starring Chris
Evans, to be released 2011. Ela has written, directed, and produced over a dozen short
films, including A Summer Rain, which won four Best-Short awards and screened at
more than 150 venues and festivals.
A prolific writer, Ela's feature scripts have been selected four times by the Independent
Film Week (formerly IFP Market). Among numerous recognitions, Ela was awarded a
fellowship grant in screenwriting from the New York Foundation for the Arts (2008), and
was nominated for the White House Project Emerging Artist Award (2010).
Ela independently teaches screenwriting and film directing in New York City. She began
with a class of eight students in 2006, and has since had over two-thousand working
and aspiring filmmakers attend her weekly classes, weekend workshops, and evening
seminars. She also teaches at the School of Visual Arts and is a graduate of the New
York University film program.
Ela grew up in Israel, spending most of her time painting or playing out on the street. In her early life, she was one of three children raised by a single mom. She taught herself to read and write when she was three-years-old, and has been writing fiction since. She wrote and directed her first full-length musical theater piece when she was eight. Besides filmmaking, she is a painter, singer-songwriter, actor, and in her twenties was a full-time scholar of Talmud and Jewish law.
