Photo by Tamara Rodriguez Reichberg

Emily Carmichael's
Illustration Portfolio

Emily Carmichael is a lifelong New Yorker. Her films, plays, paintings and comics address the divide between reality and fantasy, seeking to describe the world as it is--messy and sometimes dissapointing--as well as what it can be: magical and endlessly surprising.

As a teenager, Emily contributed two essays, "Fight Girl Power" and "Acid Torches of Doom," to Ophelia Speaks, a collection of works by adolescent girls, which spent eighteen weeks on The New York Times Best Seller List. Salon's review of the book singled out her work as the strongest in the collection and she appeared as a guest on National Public Radio's Talk of Nation to discuss issues of girlhood and modernity. She graduated Stuyvesant High School in 2000 with medals in English and Physics, and recieved Bertelsmann's World of Expression award for her short story "Losing It."

At Harvard University, Emily earned her B.A. with honors in Painting and Literature and continued to distinguish herself as an artist, playwright, and theater director. She wrote and directed two full-length plays---Stopover and The Passion Sell (co-directed with Geordie Broadwater)---and three short plays---Amy's Roadside, The Impossibles, and The Minute Kings. She also co-directed Macbeth: The Puppet Shakespeare for which she designed and sculpted twenty-two clay puppets. Her comic strip, Whiz Kids, which debuted in her high school newspaper, ran in the Harvard Crimson over two years. Seth MacFarlane, writing in Noise magazine, praised its artistry and "Doonesbury rhythms." At Cambridge, her paintings and sculptures were regularly featured in student exhibitions and she graduated with the David McCord Prize for Excellence in the Arts.

After her graduation in 2004, Emily moved back to New York City where she began to work professionally as an artist and writer. She assisted with story development on One Rat Short (Short-listed for the 2006 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film), and wrote and workshopped her new play, Madrigal's Dome, at the Manhattan Theater Club. She also served as a graphic designer for several ad and promotional campaigns and as a set designer for the second season of the Babel Theater Project.

In 2006, she entered the MFA film program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and in the past two years has written and directed five narrative short films and an animated short in addition to two short documentaries. Emily's films have been shown at the Anthology Film Archives and Avery Fischer Hall at Lincoln Center. She is entering her third year as a graduate student at NYU and is currently working on a feature thesis project, which she will write and direct.

--Jason Moring, Managing Director

Photo by Emily Carmichael

Jason is a founding member of the sixth-grade hip-hop collective the St. Boniface Boyz, widely regarded as the most influential Southeastern Tennessee parochial middle-school rap group of the late 1980s. Since that time, he's continued to rhyme ever-more underground under various noms de guerre, while doing graduate work in 19th and 20th Century Intellectual History.

Professionally, he has worked as an editor at Cambridge University Press, Columbia University Press, Conde Nast, and Kaplan. He has also designed and written educational software and test-preparation guides for students with special needs preparing for the SAT, ACT, and K-12 state-mandated exams in Math, Science, English, and Social Studies.

His reviews and essays on politics, culture, and intellectual history have appeared in publications such as Slate, The New York Observer, and the Los Angeles Times.

Since joining Kid Can Drive as the Managing Director, he has produced three short films and is set to begin work producing Emily Carmichael’s first feature film.