As a writer/director, Katy Scoggin looks for humor in life’s most mundane and humiliating corners. She tells smart, funny stories about perfectly decent people for whom everything goes horribly wrong… before going eventually right. Though she considers herself a New Yorker, Katy was raised by evangelicals in a smoggy valley east of LA. She went on to pursue degrees in sculpture and German as a Mylonas Honorary Scholar at Washington University in St. Louis. During her studies, she lived in Germany and Italy, where she studied visual art, documentary, and German. She made two short docs – one about Berlin’s headscarf debate, another about an Indian family’s love of food and struggle for identity – that transitioned her interest in film into a career aspiration. In 2005, as a Fulbright scholar in Berlin, Katy met three Turkish women who become the subjects of InsideOutsiders, a documentary about Turkish-German identity.The project took Katy from Berlin to Istanbul and Eastern Anatolia. Katy moved to New York in 2006 to go to film school at NYU. She spent her third year of coursework as a Graduate Assistant in Cinematography, a fellowship that allowed her to assistant teach, shoot films, and work closely with mentors Tony Jannelli and Sandi Sissel, ASC. In 2009, Katy returned to the documentary world with an internship under filmmaker Laura Poitras. She was an associate producer on the award-winning film The Oath (2010).She currently works as an associate producer and cinematographer at Praxis Films. Katy remains dedicated to narrative writing and directing. In May 2012, she will venture west to direct her short thesis. Flood is a bone-dry comedy, set in the Mojave Desert, about a daughter who struggles to bring her creationist dad back to earth. Katy plans to develop it into her first feature film.
Katy Scoggin was awarded a Production grant at NYU in 2010 and the Sloan Commissioning Grant at the Sundance Institute in 2012 for Flood