November 2016

Cynthia Lowen ('01) is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker and writer. She is the director of NETIZENS, a feature documentary about women and online harassment, making its world premiere at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival and its international premiere at Toronto's Hot Docs.

She is also the producer and writer of BULLY, a feature documentary film following five kids and families through "a year in the life" of America's bullying crisis. Filmed over the course of the 2009/2010 school year, BULLY opens a window onto the pained and often endangered lives of bullied kids, revealing a problem that transcends geographic, racial, ethnic, and economic borders. Lauded by reviewers, BULLY was awarded a prestigious Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia Award for excellence in journalism, as well as the 2013 Stanley Kramer Award from the Producers Guild of America, the True Life Fund Award, the Cinema Eye Audience Award, the Emery Award, the Bergen Film Festival Audience Award, and more. Through her work on BULLY, Cynthia is the co-author of The Essential Guide to Bullying, Prevention and Intervention and the editor of BULLY: An action plan for teachers and parents to combat the bullying crisis (Weinstein Books). She has authored several articles and has appeared widely on television shows and radio programs to speak on the subject.

Cynthia is also an award-winning poet and winner of the 2012 National Poetry Series for her collection The Cloud That Contained the Lightning, published by the University of Georgia Press. Using the character of J. Robert Oppenheimer, known as the "father of the atomic bomb," as a jumping-off point, the collection explores the enduring legacy of nuclear weapons. Of these poems, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes writes, "No biographer in 600 pages has come closer to understanding him [Oppenheimer]-and the bomb-than does Cynthia Lowen in these subtle, resonant poems." Cynthia is the recipient of the Hedgebrook Women Authoring Change Fellowship sponsored by William Morris Entertainment, the Discovery Prize, and residencies to the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, among other honors.

Cynthia attended Colorado College and received her MFA in creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College. She lives in New York City.