Diane Lake

Diane Lake, who previously taught screenwriting for UCLA's acclaimed Writer's Program, has been a working screenwriter since 1993 when she sold her first story idea. Since then, Lake has been commissioned to write screenplays for Columbia, Disney, Miramax, and Paramount, as well as numerous independent producers.

Lake co-wrote the screenplay of the acclaimed film Frida, a biography of the artist Frida Kahlo. The movie, starring Salma Hayek and directed by Julie Taymor, opened the Venice Film Festival in 2002 and was named one of the best films of the year by numerous Top 10 lists, including The National Board of Review and the American Film Institute. Frida also was nominated for six Academy Awards in 2003.

Lake's scripts in development have included Distance, the story of the French Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot, optioned by Columbia and subsequently by Blue Collar Films, A Thousand Cranes, an epic love story set against the backdrop of the bombing of Hiroshima in World War II, by Digital Domain Studios and Vincent, a biopic of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, optioned by Showtime.

Her script Hemingway in Paris recently sold to French producer Phillippe Chausse. Current projects under option include Ada, a biopic of Lord Byron's only legitimate daughter, and Hard-Boiled a film noir featuring Raymond Chandler. Her script Monet is in development as a French/Australian co-production. Her short fiction has appeared in the Grey Sparrow Review and she has recently been commissioned to adapt Thomas H. Cook's novel Instruments of Night for L.A. producer Tony Greenburg's Two Jacks Productions.

Professor Lake won Boston's 2011 ProArts Consortium Award given for creating a course in Writing the Film Musical, judged to be "the most innovative course involving students from more than one institution" in the Consortium. She teaches the course in conjunction with Berklee College of Music.

Lake speaks around the world on the subject of screenwriting. She has served as keynote speaker at numerous events in the U.S. and abroad, including at a recent international conference on American Studies, organized by the U.S. State Department and held in Turkey. A longtime member of the Writer's Guild of America, Lake serves as a Guild arbiter determining writing credits for films.

Watch Diane Lake talk about her work