Elisabeth Nonas

If “writing is the preservation of our lives” (novelist-essayist Cynthia Ozick), and film is “truth at 24-frames per second" (filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard), what, then, is screenwriting? As a teacher of screenwriting, and developer of the Cinema and Photography Department’s concentration in screenwriting, assistant professor Elisabeth Nonas routinely grapples with that question.  

Nonas came to Ithaca College having, among other things, written and published three novels; coauthored, with Simon LeVay, the nonfiction City of Friends: A Portrait of the Gay and Lesbian Community in America; and adapted National Book Award winner Paul Monette’s novel, Afterlife, for the screen. More recently, she completed her fourth novel, Shadow Line, and a screenplay adaptation of the same. She is currently writing Family Room, a feature-length screenplay about a middle-aged woman sandwiched between the needs of her college-aged son and her aged, increasingly infirm father.