Alice Austen

Alice Austen is an award-winning screenwriter, producer, and playwright. A graduate of Harvard Law School, she co-founded the Harvard Human Rights Journal, and she was the first American to receive a fellowship to the European Court of Human Rights. She studied creative writing under Seamus Heaney and has been awarded a Royal Court Residency; and her work has been honoured with an Independent Spirit Award, a Joseph Jefferson Award Nomination and a Terrence McNally Award Premiere Five. Austen has two films going into production, one with Alfonso Cuarón, and the other with Steven Soderbergh. Austen lived for a period in Brussels, in a Beaux Arts building called 33 Place Brugmann. In her time living in the building, she forged friendships with the building’s older residents, including an intrepid former Belgian Resistance fighter. It was here that the seed for her debut first took root. photo credit Joe Mazza