Biography

B.A., English, College of the Holy Cross

M.F.A., Film, Columbia University

KEIR POLITZ was born and raised in a Philadelphia neighborhood. He received his MFA in film with honors from Columbia University where he was the recipient of the John & Jane Smith Screenwriting Award and a departmental fellowship.

His Columbia thesis short A Piece of America was one of six U.S. films selected for international competition at the 2008 Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival in France and was featured in their 2014 “American Short Films” retrospective alongside the work of Bill Morrison, Jem Cohen, and Spike Jones. His feature film debut, DETONATOR, screened at Cinequest, the Brooklyn Film Festival, the Philadelphia Film Festival, Indie Memphis, and the Cork Film Festival, among others; was distributed theatrically and digitally; was short-listed for an Independent Spirit Award; and was praised by Variety, the Village Voice, the Wall Street Journal, Film Threat, and Filmmaker Magazine. His serial thriller, Country of the Blind, was selected for the 39th annual IFP Film Week in Brooklyn, NY and is currently in development with Bráulio Mantovani’s Son of a Gun Pictures. His latest award-winning film, Entropia, a short thriller set in the peculiar world of antique piano restoration, premiered at the 28th Philadelphia Film Festival, was an official selection of the Monmouth Film Festival, and toured through 2020 as a “Jury’s Choice” winner with the yearlong Thomas Edison Film Festival. His feature-length screenplay, La Pellegrina, was a quarterfinalist for the 2021 CineStory Foundation’s feature fellowship competition. He is currently working on his second feature Mister Wonderful. He returned to Philadelphia to teach at Temple University and then at the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently an Associate Professor at Rowan University's Radio, Television & Film Department. He is also an avid student and occasional teacher of the “gentle art” of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.