Erika Tasini is a writer/director and film scholar. After studying Comparative Literature at the University of Bologna, she earned a Master of Arts in Cinematic Critical Studies and a Master of Fine Arts in Directing at the University of California, Los Angeles. She received a one-year diploma in Film and Theatre at the University of Kent, Canterbury, and attended a Screenwriting program at the Conservatoire Européen d’Ecriture Audiovisuelle, in Paris.
Her shorts, Winter Sea and Chronicles of Impeccable Sportsmanship, screened at over a hundred prominent film festivals, including Slamdance, Edinburgh, the Chicago International Film Festival, LACMA, the Cinémathèque Française and the Torino Film Festival, where they were both awarded Best Shorts. Selected in the Berlinale Talent Campus, she competed for the Today Berlin Award 2011.
In 2008, she was also selected for the Lincoln Center Directors’ Lab. She was also invited to the multidisciplinary artistic residency ENPARTS at Dansenshus, Stockholm, where she created the three-screen projection The Eye is Not the Camera.
In the field of documentary, Erika wrote the feature documentary An African Election (Urban Republic). Programmed at IDFA, Sundance and Locarno, the film won the Rome Independent Film Festival Vision Award, the Audience Award at Nyon and Best Documentary at the Atlanta Film Festival. Nominated for the Spirit Independent Award for Best Documentary, An African Election was released in UK and US cinemas.
Erika is about to start production on a feature documentary on the transformation of Italy’s national identity. In its development stage, the project was selected for the Italian Doc Screenings (Palermo) and the IDFA Academy, at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam, 2013. Erika is also collaborating on the writing of the Italo-Brazilian documentary Favela Futebol Club (Kino Productions).
Her film industry experience ranges from associate programming for the UCLA Film Archive, to selecting the Slamdance competition and consulting with Paramount Classics. A film scholar, she lectured on Film Theory, Documentary, Screenwriting, and Directing at UCLA and the California Institute of the Arts,Valencia. She’s currently teaching Film Production as well as Cinema History Courses at John Cabot University and the American University of Rome.
