Biography
Born in the suburban jungles of upstate New York, Stevie Tuszynski began her lifelong obsession with movies at the age of 8, when her oldest brother dragged most of the family to the other side of Monroe County to see E.T. The Extra Terrestrial at a sneak preview with, of all films, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid. Under such influences, and living with the chaos of five older siblings and a huge extended family, it was perhaps inevitable that she aspired to be a writer.
After satisfying her more intellectual side by earning a BA in history and graduating summa cum laude from St. John Fisher College, Tuszynski went on to earn an MFA in film at Boston University, studying under Steve Geller, award-winning screenwriter of the 1972 adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5. She worked on several projects with Geller and his partner Karen Mankovich, including managing their off-beat play Opportunities in Zero Gravity, which features six characters who told the humorous stories of their encounters with aliens and alien conspiracies. She also co-produced a short film they wrote called Cuppa Cabby, Piece O'Pie in 1999. The film went on to win Best Comedy at the Zoie 2000 film festival.
Not content with staying in one place too long, Tuszynski has lived in Boston, New York, San Francisco - where she rode the wave of the dot-com rise and fall - and Los Angeles before moving to Ohio. Besides traveling to Britain and Canada, she also drove across the US one summer and was even brave enough to go to Texas several times.
In terms of writing, she is polishing 24/7/365 (go here to see a short excerpt), a romantic comedy about Gen Xers in the early days of the dot-com boom in San Francisco, and working on an original novel, tentatively titled Silver Springs. For the past four years her energies have been focused on earning a PhD at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. She graduated from the American Culture Studies program in May of 2006. Her dissertation, which shares the name of her feature-length documentary, In Real Life, is a case-study of online social interaction that examines the boundaries between "real life" and online interaction. In addition to her numerous conference presentations, she also has a chapter in Reading Stargate and Beyond, edited by Stan Beeler and Lisa Dickson.
Currently, she is the Visiting Assistant Professor of Film in the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of Toledo in Ohio.