Age: 63
Kim Krizan (born November 1, 1961) is an American writer and actress best known for originating the characters in the "Before" series with her writing on Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004), for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and a Writers Guild Award. Both films were based on characters she created with Richard Linklater. Krizan currently resides in Los Angeles, where she writes and teaches writing courses, most notably at UCLA.
Life and career
Krizan was featured in Linklater's Slacker (1991) and Waking Life (2001). She is known for her part in Dazed and Confused (1993) where she plays the high school teacher, Ginny Stroud. Krizan also appeared and wrote her monologue in Waking Life, which discusses language and love.
In 2007, Krizan was selected as spokesperson for the screenwriting software Final Draft.
Starting in 2008, Krizan branched out into writing comic books and graphic novels. She wrote the "2061" comic series that was published in Zombie Tales #1, 9, and 11 by BOOM! Studios, with all three installments collected into a stand-alone graphic novel entitled Zombie Tales 2061 in mid-2009. This led to an appearance at the 2009 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, where she along with husband Chip Mosher, Michael Alan Nelson, Gary Philips and Mark Waid participated in "Big! Bold! BOOM!: BOOM! Studios Talks Comics," discussion, which was moderated by Los Angeles Times writer Geoff Boucher.
She contributed the story "Of and Concerning the Ancient, Mystical, and Holy Origins of That Most Down and Dirty 20th Century Rock n' Roll Club: CBGB" to issue #3 of the CBGB comic book miniseries that hit store shelves in September 2010. As of the Fall of 2010, a collection of the four issue miniseries is available as a stand-alone graphic novel.
TVO Saturday Night At The Movies selected Kim Krizan for a promotional spot in celebration of the show's 40th anniversary.
In October 2012, Publishers Weekly spotlighted Krizan's self-publishing efforts on Kickstarter for her debut non-fiction book Original Sins: Trade Secrets of the Femme Fatale. The Kickstarter campaign was successfully funded in November 2012. Krizan's book is available on Amazon.com.
On September 27, 2013, Kim Krizan published an article on The Huffington Post revealing she had found a previously unpublished love letter written by Gore Vidal to the diarist Anaïs Nin. This letter contradicts Vidal's previous characterization of his relationship with Nin, showing that Vidal did have feelings for her that he later heavily disavowed in his autobiography, Palimpsest. Krizan did this research in the run up to the release of the latest volume of Nin's uncensored diary, Mirages, for which she wrote the foreword.