Elisha Miranda-Ramirez

Elisha Miranda-Ramirez is a Gen X writer, director, producer and professor of Puerto Rican descent who was raised in San Francisco’s Mission District. Her mother’s family became multi-generational Hularicans when they were forced to leave Puerto Rico after a major hurricane in the early 1900s to work the sugar cane fields of Hawaii. The other side of her family came directly from Orocovis, Puerto Rico and landed in New York City, where she lived for 20 years. She founded the production company Sister Outsider Entertainment and the nonprofit Chica Luna Productions in East Harlem where she wrote, directed and produced more than 100 award-winning films. Miranda-Ramirez also directed commercials and branded content for MAC, Harley Davidson, Clinique and Dove. She was the first in her family to attend college and received her MFA in directing and screenwriting from Columbia University, her MCP (Master's in City Planning) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was also a digital media Fellow, and her BA in Ethnic Studies and English from the University of California, Berkeley.

In her previous life, Miranda-Ramirez was not just a policy wonk but a non-profit executive who co-founded organizations and programs serving women/girls, youth, people of color, LGBTQI, Latinx/Latine and immigrants/refugees while raising a multi-million-dollar endowment. She received Kellogg and Ford Foundation Awards as well as numerous others for her social activism.

Miranda-Ramirez has published novellas, non-fiction and YA novels with Simon & Schuster for which she won the YALSA Award and a National Book Foundation Award. She is also a produced playwright. Her television pilot The Elementarians won the 2021 PGA Creates Fellowship and is being adapted into a young adult graphic novel (Knopf). Her television pilot Chosen Family (also a forthcoming memoir) garnered her a seat in the 2022 National Hispanic Media Coalition Scriptwriters Program. Miranda-Ramirez has received awards from the Tribeca Film Festival, Academy Nicholl Fellowships, National Association of Latino Independent Producers, National Association of Latino Arts & Culture, Athena Film Festival, Cinequest, Berlinale and Sundance.

For the past decade she has been teaching writing, directing and producing for film and television at the university level as she raises her three children, each hailing from a different continent. She was a tenured associate professor and chaired the Department of Film and Theatre at San Jose State University while also serving as the executive producer for Spartan Film Studios, SJSU's in-house production facility. She has been an adjunct at Columbia University, NYU and SUNY Purchase.

She is repped by Johanna V. Castillo at Writers House in New York City, Marilyn Atlas Management and Dino Karlaftes at Kaplan Stahler.

She considers choosing every day to teach, create and act from a place of audacious authenticity, integrity, reflection and social activism as her crowning achievement.