Alexandra Viets

Alexandra Anastasia Viets is a writer/award-winning screenwriter and journalist whose work focuses on women and dislocation. She has taught in the MFA programs at Towson University’s Department of Theater Arts and at American University in Washington, D.C., specializing in literature and film. Awarded a fellowship in 2011 by the National Endowment for Humanities, she has also taught extensively in Northeast India and the Middle East, focusing on personal biography. Her film/theater reviews and essays have appeared in publications such as The International Herald Tribune/NYT, the Far Eastern Economic Review and the Asia Wall Street Journal.

Her first feature-length screenplay, Cotton Mary, about a community of Anglo-Indian women in post-independence India, won a New York Foundation for the Arts award and was produced by Merchant Ivory. The original screenplay of Cotton Mary was published by Penguin Books. She has worked for years as a Creative Consultant for the Sundance Institute’s supported RAWI Screenwriters Lab in Amman, Jordan, helping to develop the work of Arab filmmakers. Excerpts of her memoir, After the War, about her mother’s role in the Warsaw Uprising, have been published in Thin Air, Nowhere Magazine and shortlisted for Wasafiri’s New Writing Prize in London.

In addition to her work in the MA in Writing Program at Johns Hopkins, she currently teaches a year-long Masterclass in Film at the Bethesda Writers Center. She is a board member for Groundswell Media, an organization devoted to social transformation through film. Viets received her BA from Oberlin College and an MFA from Columbia University.