Biography
Emily Carmichael grew up in New York City. At Stuyvesant High School, she was the top English student in her graduating class and tied for second place in Physics.
As a teenager, she contributed two essays, "Fight Girl Power" and "Acid Torches of Doom," to Ophelia Speaks, a collection of writings by adolescent girls that stayed on the New York Times Best Seller List for eighteen weeks. Salon praised her contributions as the strongest in the collection, and she appeared as a guest on National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation to discuss themes of girlhood and modernity. In 2000, she received Bertelsmann's World of Expression Award for her short story "Losing It."
At Harvard University, she earned a B.A. with honors in Painting and Literature, excelling as an artist, playwright, and theater director. She wrote and directed two full-length plays—Stopover and The Passion Sell (co-directed with Geordie Broadwater)—and three short plays: Amy's Roadside, The Impossibles, and The Minute Kings. She co-directed Macbeth: The Puppet Shakespeare, designing and sculpting twenty-two clay puppets. Her comic strip Whiz Kids, which began in her high school newspaper, ran in the Harvard Crimson for two years. Seth MacFarlane, writing for Noise magazine, praised its artistry and Doonesbury-like rhythms. Her paintings and sculptures were regularly displayed in student exhibitions, and she received the David McCord Prize for Excellence in the Arts upon graduation.
After graduating in 2004, she returned to New York City to work professionally as an artist and writer. She contributed to story development for One Rat Short (shortlisted for the 2006 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film) and wrote and workshopped her play Madrigal's Dome at the Manhattan Theater Club. Additionally, she worked as a graphic designer on various advertising and promotional campaigns and as a set designer for the second season of the Babel Theater Project.
In 2006, she enrolled in the MFA film program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Her thesis film, The Hunter and the Swan Discuss Their Meeting, premiered at Sundance in 2011. Since then, her short films have been featured at Sundance, Tribeca, SXSW, and numerous international film festivals.
