Belarus-born award-winning film director Darya Zhuk has been obsessing over filmmaking long enough to see her short films selected at SXSW, Tarkovsky, Oaxaca, Atlanta, Palm Springs, Koroche, Santa Fe Independent film festivals, to name a few. She is a graduate of Columbia University MFA program in Directing. Darya lives and creates between Minsk and Brooklyn. In 2015, she won the best female writer/director award from New York Women in Film and Television for her short film The Real American. Her feature debut Crystal Swan screened in the East of the West Competition at Karlovy Vary IFF 2018 and won the Grand Prix at the Odesa International Film Festival.