Hi. I’m Laramie.
I’m a director and screenwriter committed to telling honest, unexpected stories about underrepresented characters. My goal is to investigate the human condition. (No biggie.)
I’m currently in post-production on WHERE IN THE HELL, an arthouse buddy comedy about a pair of exiles from LA who meet up on the road. This marks my feature film writing and directing debut.
Our test audience raves, “Authentic and funny and poignant and visually exquisite… It's America as we hardly ever see it.” And, “It brought me back to the movies I LOVED SO MUCH in high school like the Hal Hartley and Alison Anders indies of the 90s. Enjoyable, lighthearted and sometimes fun movies, but that also care about being beautifully shot, evoking a range of emotion and having characters asking questions of themselves and their lives.”
Coming in 2024! I’ll keep you posted. (I mean that. If you’d like jaunty, periodic updates, you can sign up for my newsletter.)
Next up I plan to shoot a feature on Denman Island, an idyllic, used-to-be hippie enclave on the west coast of Canada, where I spent every other year as a kid.
LIFE ON sMARS, another project in development, inspired by a controversial, real-life NASA experiment, earned me a spot at THROUGH HER LENS: The Tribeca Chanel Women’s Filmmaker Program, along with a grant from The Tribeca Film Institute. With sMARS, I made finalist for the Women in Film Production Program, the SFFILM Sloan Fellowship, and the TFI Sloan Filmmaker Fund.
GIRL PRETENDING TO READ RILKE, my adaptation of the offbeat coming-of-age novel by my mother, Barbara Riddle, was a finalist in Script Pipeline’s Screenwriting Contest.
What else?
I’ve built a supporting career as a script supervisor on features and episodic television. I’m a member of IATSE Local 871. For eight seasons I was a casting director for the Emmy Award-winning Project Runway; I also scouted fashion designers for Heidi Klum and Tim Gunn’s subsequent project, Making the Cut.
I have an MFA in Film & Television Production from USC. My thesis film, ALL AGES, a punk/funk homage to the John Hughes movies I watched over and over as a teenager, was shot on Super 16 with the help of grants from Panavision and Kodak, and premiered at the Vancouver International Film Festival. GREASY HEART, another short, was made with the support of Digital Bolex and Hive Lighting, and serves as proof of concept (or disproof of concept?) for a biopic about Grace Slick that stalled.
As an undergrad at Wesleyan University, I majored in English and theater. I spent a decade in New York directing and developing Off-Off-Broadway plays, most notably at Jim Simpson and Sigourney Weaver’s Flea Theater, where I was a resident director, and at “the downtown powerhouse” Soho Rep. I co-founded and chaired, for six seasons, the Soho Rep Writer Director Lab.
Once a month, I send out The Laramie Report, an email newsletter with stuff about me and my creative projects, yes, but also recommends for tacos! lots of tacos (see map), women-driven movies, tv, and books, and the occasional link to an excellent pair of overalls. My readers rave, “I love love love this… My favorite thing on the interweb,” and “better than the NY Times.” Sign up below!