Kirsten Sheridan | |
---|---|
Born |
Dublin, Ireland |
July 14, 1976
Occupation | Director, screenwriter, editor |
Years active | 1995–present |
Children | 3 |
Kirsten Sheridan (born July 14, 1976) is an Irish film director and screenwriter. The director of August Rush (2007) and Disco Pigs (2001), Sheridan was nominated for an Academy Award for co-writing the semi-autobiographical film In America with her father, director Jim Sheridan, and her sister, Naomi Sheridan.
Born in Dublin, Sheridan moved to New York City in 1981, spending her early childhood there while her father struggled to make it as an actor and theater director. Her family moved back to Ireland eight years later, whereupon her father found success as the director of My Left Foot, in which Sheridan plays the younger sister of lead actor Daniel Day-Lewis. She studied script writing at New York University in 1993 and went to film school at University College Dublin, ultimately earning her film degree from Dun Laoghaire College of Art and Design in 1998.
Her thesis short film Patterns won several international film festival awards, including Clermont-Ferrand, Cork, Galway, Dresden, Aspen, and Chicago, and her next short, The Case of Majella McGinty, about a little girl who escapes her stressful life by crawling into a suitcase, received festival awards at Foyle, Cork, San Francisco, Cologne, and Worldfest Houston.
The first feature film Sheridan directed was 2001's Disco Pigs, Enda Walsh's screen adaptation of his own play, starring Cillian Murphy and Elaine Cassidy as teenagers in a lifelong, obsessive, antisocial friendship.The Guardian described the independent film as a "stylised, hyperkinetic drama ... that combines kitchen-sink realism and vicious fight scenes with highly stylised fantasy sequences".Disco Pigs earned Sheridan nominations for best director at the British Independent Film Awards and the Irish Film & TV Academy Awards, as well as prizes at the Castellinaria Youth Film Festival, the Giffoni Film Festival, the Young European Cinema Film Festival and the Ourense Film Festival.