Daniel Algrant

Daniel Algrant is an award-winning American filmmaker and writer based in New York City. He is best known for co-writing and directing Naked in New York (1993), a film produced by Martin Scorsesse which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and received the Critics Prize at the Deauville International Film Festival. Algrant was a repeat director for the iconic television series Sex and The City (1999) and the noted director of the films People I Know (2002), starring Al Pacino and Greetings from Tim Buckley (2012). Algrant is an alumnus of Harvard University and the Columbia University Film school.

Introduction

Daniel Algrant is an award-winning American filmmaker and writer based in New York City. He is best known for co-writing and directing Naked in New York (1993), a film produced by Martin Scorsesse which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and received the Critics Prize at the Deauville International Film Festival. Algrant was a repeat director for the iconic television series Sex and The City (1999) and the noted director of the films People I Know (2002), starring Al Pacino and Greetings from Tim Buckley (2012). Algrant is an alumnus of Harvard University and the Columbia University Film school.

Early Life

Algrant was born on September 25th, 1959 in New York City to parents Roland Algrant, a Turkish immigrant and Rosalie Callahan a Russian immigrant -- both of whom worked in publishing. His father later became a prominent human rights activist helping to spur the development of Human Rights Watch and went on to lead The Children’s Rights Watch.

Algrant’s love for film and television was first seeded after a near-death fall from a tree at the age of eight that left him isolated and bedridden for an extended stretch of his childhood. An advanced student, Algrant attended Phillips Academy Andover High School, a top boarding school located in Massachusetts at just 12 years old. While attending school he moved in with his grandmother in Cornwall, Connecticut who was a formative figure in his young life. He attended Andover for four years where he began filmmaking.

After highschool, Algrant moved to Los Angeles where he took different jobs in lighting and became a gaffer in documentaries for independent filmmakers Joyce Chopra and Dick Rogers.

Education

Algrant attended Harvard University where he designed a Special Concentration in Sociology and Psychology or the American Religious Experience. As a freshman, visiting professor Dusan Makavejev, an influential Yugosolovian filmmaker, was impressed enough with an early piece by Algrant to enroll him in a course traditionally reserved for graduate students and select seniors. Algrant would draw great inspiration from this course, learning to combine fiction and reality in creative ways. Algrant continued as a Teaching Assistant for his advisor Robert Coles, the Pulitzer Prize winning Psychiatrist and would later complete an MFA at the Columbia University Film school, where he studied with Milos Forman and Martin Scorsese.

Early Work

Algrant’s first film,Cathedral, was a short documentary he co-directed centering on a young boy who had been severely burned by exposed heating pipes in Boston’s Cathedral Housing Project. The film won prizes at the Chicago International Film Festival and was screened for members of the Boston Housing Authority to help them improve conditions in their housing projects.

While studying at Harvard and Columbia he wrote and directed several short films including Sandra, Grandma Ida, and Some Film Chopping Wood, in which Algrant himself starred. In his second year at Harvard, Algrant created his first distributed film, Anything for Jazz (Rhapsody Films) a documentary on the legendary jazz pianist and composer Jaki Byard.

His first fictional films were The First Dance Ever, which won Best Student Film at the New England Film Festival, and Swimming, which was runner-up at Nissan’s National FOCUS Awards in Los Angeles for best student films of the year and would later premiere at the Sundance Film Festival.

External links

• Daniel Algrant at IMDb