Erik Jendresen is an author as well as a writer and producer for plays, television, and film.
As lead writer and a supervising producer of the critically acclaimed mini-series Band of Brothers for HBO in 2001, Jendresen was one of the recipients of that year's Emmy Award for "Outstanding Miniseries", which he shared with Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, among others. Jendresen also shared an Emmy nomination for that show in the category of "Outstanding Writing for a Miniseries, Movie or a Dramatic Special". The show also resulted in a Golden Globe Award for "Best Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television", and 20 other awards, including the Peabody Award.
As a writer/ producer for film, his current projects include Ithaca - an adaptation of William Saroyan's The Human Comedy (directed by Meg Ryan and starring Sam Shepard and Hamish Linklater); Saint-Ex (directed by Christopher McQuarrie); Aloft (starring Robert Redford); Mission: Blacklist (directed by Jesper Ganslandt); Solo (directed by Antonio Banderas); and an adaptation of Walter Tevis's The Man Who Fell to Earth (directed by David Slade). Earlier film projects include Star Trek: The Beginning (Paramount), Sublime, starring Tom Cavanagh and Kathleen York, Otis and The Big Bang (starring Antonio Banderas and Sam Elliott).
As a writer/producer for television, his current projects include the series Subversive (Tandem); the four-hour miniseries Shot All to Hell (TNT/Sony); the eight-hour miniseries The 43 and Dragoon; a scripted series based on the work of Ray Kurzweil (Showtime); Killing Lincoln, co-produced with Tony and Ridley Scott for the National Geographic Channel; a series based on the Francis Ford Coppola film, The Conversation (with Christopher McQuarrie); The Pony Express (with Robert Duvall); an eight-hour adaptation of Gregory Maguire's novel, Wicked (ABC); the eight-hour miniseries Majestic-12; and The Command - a series set in the world of the Joint Special Operations Command (FIC).
Jendresen also has to his credit several books, most of which deal with the socio-anthropology of Peru and the Amazon Basin, including Dance of the Four Winds and its sequel, Island of the Sun (both based upon the journals of and co-written with Alberto Villoldo), and the children's book, The First Story Ever Told (also with Villoldo). Hanuman (with Joshua M. Greene, and Li Ming) is a re-telling for children of a portion of the Ramayana.
He is also a playwright (The Killing of Michael Malloy, Excuse My Dust, Malice Aforethought).
Jendresen lives in Sausalito, California, aboard the M.V. Hindeloopen, 108-year-old riveted wrought iron vessel which saw service during the evacuation of Dunkirk in 1940. He is married to Venus Madora Aslee Bobis, Program Director of the Partial Hospitalization Program at Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute of the University of California, San Francisco, and his partner in Pilothouse Pictures.
He is an advisor at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab.