Debra Granik

Debra Granik
Granik at the 2010 Deauville American Film Festival
Born	(1963-02-06) February 6, 1963 (age 54) Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.
Occupation	Film director, cinematographer, screenwriter
Years active	1997–present

Debra Granik (born February 6, 1963) is an American independent film director. She has won a series of awards at the Sundance Film Festival, including Best Short in 1998 for Snake Feed (her first film, made while a student at New York University), the Dramatic Directing Award in 2004 for her first feature-length film, Down to the Bone (a tale of addiction she co-scripted with Richard Lieske), and the Grand Jury Prize for Drama in 2010 and Prix du jury at Deauville American Film Festival 2010 for her second feature, Winter's Bone. In 2011, she received the Director's Award for vision and talent at the Athena Film Festival.

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Granik grew up in the affluent suburbs of Washington D.C. She is of Jewish descent. She received her B.A. from Brandeis University in 1985, where she majored in politics and became very interested in documentary film, democratic media, and feminism. After graduation, Granik started making educational films for trade unions. She later earned an MFA from the graduate film program at New York University (Tisch School of the Arts). While at NYU, she mentored under Boris Frumin and directed her first short, Snake Feed. Granik is the granddaughter of broadcast pioneer Theodore Granik (1907–1970), founder-moderator of radio-TV's long-run panel discussion program, The American Forum of the Air.

Granik calls filmmaking "an organic, incremental process". Her first short, Snake Feed, was accepted into Sundance Film Festival's labs for screenwriting and directing, and eventually this short grew into her first feature-length film, Down to the Bone in 2004. This film tells the story of an upstate New York mother who goes to rehab to kick her cocaine addiction and ends up falling in love with a nurse and, with his help, descending back into her old drug habits. This film was based on an original screenplay written by Granik and her creative partner, Anne Rosellini. The main character, played by Vera Farmiga, was inspired by a woman that Granik met while attending film school in New York.