Yared Zeleke

Yared Zeleke earned his MFA in Writing and Directing from New York University where his thesis short film, Lottery Boy, earned him an award from the Hollywood Foreign Press Agency in 2012. Zeleke’s first feature, Lamb, screened at Cannes Film Festival in 2015. It was the first out of his native Ethiopia to be in the "Official Selection”. The film garnered positive reviews, including from the New York Times, BBC, CNN, PBS, Guardian, Financial Times, Le Monde, and Der Spiegel. The North American premier for Lamb was at the Toronto International Film Festival. Variety magazine subsequently featured Zeleke among the “10 Screenwriters to Watch”. Lamb made the 2016 Oscars Best Foreign Language Film Award shortlist and has since sold to over thirty territories, including the U.S. and China. Zeleke was awarded the following for his scripts Lamb and Sunbirds: • A Rockefeller Resident Fellowship at the Bellagio Center, Italy, 2016 • Screenwriting grant from the San Francisco Film Society, 2016 • German ARTE prize, 2014 • Swiss Visions Sud Est prize, 2014 • Grant from the Aide au Cinema Du Monde (CNC), 2014 In addition to working on his projects and script consulting on others', Zeleke teaches screenwriting as well as directing.

zelekefilms (at) gmail.com