Award-winning filmmaker Laura Bialis was born in Los Angeles and raised in Santa Barbara, California. A drama enthusiast from a very early age, Laura grew up aspiring to perform on stage. She took acting classes and studied voice, speech and dance. In her undergraduate years at Stanford University she majored in European History, focusing on the wartime and postwar period in Eastern Europe. Studying wartime Poland with Professor Norman Naimark, she wrote a thesis about the Polish and Jewish resistance movements in Polish ghettos during the Holocaust. She also worked in Stanford’s Hoover Archives as a research assistant. While at Stanford, Laura read literature, studied art, and spent hour upon hour in the school’s darkroom, manipulating black and white photos that she had shot with her Dad’s old Minolta. She spent her junior year in Florence, studying the art of the Masters, modern Italian history, the politics of the European Union, and Italian cinema. She learned to speak Italian by watching Italian films with no subtitles. In the process, her new passion for the cinema was born. By the time she left Italy she realized that, using her drama experience and love of photography, she could create films about the history and literature that fascinated her. In 1996 she entered the University of Southern California’s Master of Fine Arts Program in Cinema-Television. She made her first film at USC; screening it for a classroom full of my peers was one of the scariest and most rewarding experiences of her life. Among the films she made that year, one of the most successful was Attitude, a short documentary about thirteen year-old musician and athlete Tyler Dumm. Blind and using a prosthetic leg, Tyler is one of the most enthusiastic and inspiring individuals she had ever met. Attitude captured, in a very honest way, Tyler’s energy, creativity, and personality -- and serendipitously introduced her to the documentary genre. Tak for Alt: Survival of a Human Spirit, the hour-long documentary she produced and co-directed about Holocaust survivor Judy Meisel, grew directly from her experiences with Attitude. Traveling across Europe with a DV-CAM and a sound mixer in their backpacks, Laura and her collaborators re-traced the experiences of Mrs. Meisel, a remarkable woman who continues to lecture on civil rights to this day. Currently, the company she founded to produce the film, Sirena Films, is distributing the film to schools and educators around the country. TAK FOR ALT is the winner of the National Educational Media Network’s Gold Apple for excellence in educational film and video. The film has recently been purchased by the Danish Broadcasting Corporation for television broadcast in Denmark. When not working on her own films at USC, Laura enjoys collaborating on other student projects as a cinematographer. She has shot three advanced thesis films at USC. Laura plans to parlay her experience in narrative and documentary production into a career as a director and producer. Above all, history still casts its spell over her and she continues to look to the past for stories that she can bring to life for a new generation of audiences.