Lilian Mehrel creates film & tv, illustrated books, and virtual reality. She is a writer/director with a fresh sense of humor and vision.

Her films have premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and won her awards from ABC/Disney, the Marcie Bloom / Sony Pictures Classics Fellowship, Alfred P. Sloan, the Science & Entertainment Exchange / Imagine Science Films, NYU Tisch Interdepartmental grants, the Puffin Foundation, the Nancy Malone Directing Award, New York Women in Film & TV, NYU and Kanbar scholarships, and student award nominations for Kodak, the National Board Review, and BAFTA.

With a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, she is an MFA candidate at New York University’s Tisch Graduate Film in Directing & Writing.

Lilian was born to a Kurdish-Iranian mother and German-Jewish father, sparking her life-long experience of multiple worlds. From science to art, from Miami public school to Dartmouth College - where she was awarded a Senior Fellowship. She wrote and illustrated a 226-page family memoir, published for Rauner Special Collections. She also began improv at Dartmouth, continuing in Cambridge and New York City.

Her stories reveal the underlying universalities she sees between people, shaped by her work connecting youth from conflicting countries – with Seeds of Peace, the U.S. State Department, a Kathryn Davis Peace Project, and YALA Peace – a creative leadership program for diverse girls she founded at the Arab Jewish Community Center of Yafo.

Lilian is currently writing comedy television and making playful/artful short films. Her work includes creating a James Franco BTS series, videos for Vogue, and a collaboration with Within and the Portals project at the United Nations. She created one of the first virtual reality narratives – haunt – which was an official selection at Tribeca’s Interactive Playground. Maira Kalman called her work “epic and cinematic… full of heart and curiosity.” Lilian promptly fainted.