Part of the XDP Seminar Speaker Series
About Dr. Graham Sack
Dr. Graham Sack is an award-winning screenwriter, director, and academic whose work engages with technology and scientific discovery. He is the Founder of
Chronotope Films and the recipient of the 2021 Sundance Institute Sloan Foundation Episodic Fellowship for his television series
The Harvard Computers, which tells the true story of America’s first female astronomers.
In the area of virtual reality, Graham was approached by Penguin Random House to adapt and direct George Saunders’ best-selling novel Lincoln in the Bardo (winner of the Man Booker prize) into an immersive film that was distributed by the New York Times newly formed VR division. It was the first-ever adaptation of a novel into virtual reality, a finalist for an Emmy Award for Innovation in Interactive Programming, and called one of the “top 5 must-see virtual reality experiences of the year” by Time Magazine. His other immersive media projects have received support from Google, Samsung, and Felix & Paul Studios and appeared at Tribeca Film Festival, SXSW, New York Theater Workshop, Sotheby’s, Vancouver International Festival, and Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona. Most recently, he was commissioned by four-time Academy Award nominee Alexander Rodnyansky (Loveless, Leviathan, East/West, Stalingrad) to adapt the memoir Debriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein into a four-hour limited series starring Joel Kinnaman (The Killing, Altered Carbon, Robocop) that is shooting in Cairo this spring. His screenplay, Septillion to One, about Stanford statistics PhD who cracked the Texas scratch-off lottery, made the Hollywood Blacklist, and sold to Madison Wells Media in one of the most competitive spec sales of the year with Mark Romanek (Never Let Me Go, One Hour Photo) attached to direct. Graham’s other screenplays include Operation Ivy League, a true crime story about a drug cartel based at a Columbia University fraternity, written for Kevin McCormick at Langley Park Entertainment (Gangster Squad, Traffic) and Lunch Money, a satire about the 2008 financial crisis that won first place in the Final Draft Big Break Competition and was a finalist for the Nicholl Fellowship.
Graham began his career as a child actor on Broadway, starring in Neil Simon's Lost in Yonkers and in films such as Dunston Checks In and TV shows such as Law & Order and New York Undercover. He is a member of the Writers Guild of America, Writers Guild of Canada, Screen Actors Guild, and Actors Equity Association and an alumnus of New Inc (the New Museum’s art, design, and technology incubator).
Graham also holds a BA in Physics from Harvard College, an MSc in Economics from the London School of Economics, and a PhD in Digital Humanities from Columbia University, where his research was focused on computational approaches to storytelling. He is on faculty at Johns Hopkins University as a Fellow in iDeas Lab at the Berman Institute for Bioethics and in in the Film and Media MA Program, where he teaches Immersive Storytelling and Emerging Technologies (ISET). Previously, he was a Visiting Scholar in Data Poetics at the Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society at University of Notre Dame and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Modeling Interdisciplinary Inquiry at Washington University in St. Louis. Graham is represented by Stuart Manashil at Novo Entertainment.
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