Edina Kishonthy

Edina was born and raised in Hungary, where her coming-of-age novel, “Red Snow” (which she wrote in high school) became a cult favorite of her generation, and sold 10 thousand copies. After the Iron Curtain fell, she was one of the first students to receive a scholarship to a liberal arts college in the U.S. Following graduation, she returned to Budapest and worked for the Open Society Archives, which started as a repository for the holdings of the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Institute, and has since grown into a laboratory that aims to explore new ways of assessing and presenting archival documents both in a professional and a consciously activist way. During her time at OSA, Edina was Exhibitions Manager, and in that capacity, she organized several public exhibits on political and historical themes, making use of archival documents from OSA and other similar collaborating institutions. Edina moved to Los Angeles to pursue her longtime dream of making films when she was accepted to the Peter Stark Producing Program at the University of Southern California Film School. After completing the program, Edina has worked with a number of independent producers as a script doctor, and helped them get the most out of a screenplay while respecting the writer’s original vision. During this time, she also went on to earn a second degree related to her other passion, psychotherapy. Using her experience from the pre-licensure internship at a special needs school, Edina has created an acting-based curriculum of her social skills program “Expressions” for autistic teenagers, which is the only group currently in Los Angeles where children on the spectrum are mixed with neurotypical peer volunteers – a cornerstone of Edina’s philosophy on addressing autism. In the past few years, Edina’s film making skills were honed by her young daughter, who requires her to film soap operas featuring Littlest Pet Shop figures. In the Fall of 2016 Edina finally made the leap to movies with human and feline actors, when she wrote and directed the retro short romantic comedy “In a Dream,” soon hit the festival circuit. She is currently working on a feature script in the vein of “In a Dream,” hoping to revive the tradition of action romcoms such as “The Jewel of the Nile.”