Ioana Uricaru is a director, screenwriter, and Assistant Professor of Film and Media Culture at Middlebury College. She was born in Cluj, Romania, under the communist dictatorship, and lived through the violent anti-government 1989 uprising and often traumatic political transition that followed. Uricaru earned her MSci in biochemistry from the University of Bucharest before she decided to become a filmmaker. In 2001 Uricaru relocated to Los Angeles to study at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, where she received her MFA in Film and Television Production and PhD in Critical Studies. Her dissertation focused on the relationship between discourse and experience in cinema, analyzed through the perspective of the neuroscience of emotion. Her scholarship on contemporary Romanian cinema has been published in The Velvet Light Trap, Film Quarterly, The Blackwell Companion to Eastern European Cinemas (edited by Aniko Imre), and New Romanian Cinema (edited by Christina Stojanova and Dana Duma). Her film criticism and reviews have appeared in Romanian and international newspapers and journals.

Uricaru’s films have been included in the official selections at, among others, Cannes (2009), Sundance (2011), and the American Film Institute (2007). She co-directed the omnibus Tales from the Golden Age (Mobra Films, 2009), distributed commercially in over 30 countries. Her first feature project as a writer/director, Lemonade, which she calls a “European take on the ‘American Dream,’” was supported by the Cinefondation Residency of the Cannes Film Festival and the Sundance Directors’ lab program.