Emily Carmichael was born and raised in New York City. She was the top-ranked English student in her graduating class at Stuyvesant High School, and shared the second-place ranking in Physics with one other student.
As a teenager, she contributed two essays ("Fight Girl Power" and "Acid Torches of Doom") to Ophelia Speaks, a collection of works by adolescent girls, which spent eighteen weeks on the New York Times Best Seller List. Salon's review of the book singled out her work as the strongest in the collection and she appeared as a featured guest on National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation to discuss issues of girlhood and modernity. In 2000 she won Bertelsmann's World of Expression Award for her short story "Losing It."
At Harvard University, she earned her B.A. with honors in Painting and Literature and continued to distinguish herself as an artist, playwright, and theater director. She wrote and directed two full-length plays -- Stopover and The Passion Sell (co-directed with Geordie Broadwater) -- and three short plays -- Amy's Roadside, The Impossibles, and The Minute Kings. She also co-directed a production of Macbeth: The Puppet Shakespeare for which she designed and sculpted twenty-two clay puppets. Her comic strip, Whiz Kids, which debuted in her high school newspaper, ran in the Harvard Crimson over two years. Seth MacFarlane, writing in Noise magazine, praised its artistry and Doonesbury rhythms. In Cambridge her paintings and sculptures were regularly featured in student exhibitions and she graduated with the David McCord Prize for Excellence in the Arts.
After her graduation in 2004, she moved back to New York City where she began to work professionally as an artist and writer. She assisted with story development on One Rat Short (Short-listed for the 2006 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film), and wrote and workshopped her new play, Madrigal's Dome, at the Manhattan Theater Club. She also served as a graphic designer for several ad and promotional campaigns and as a set designer for the second season of the Babel Theater Project.
In 2006, she entered the MFA film program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Her thesis film, The Hunter and the Swan Discuss Their Meeting, premiered at Sundance in 2011. Since then, her short films have screened at Sundance, Tribeca and SXSW, as well as international film festivals around the world.
