A lifelong love for acting and writing propelled Sasha Isaac-Young, AB ’99, BFA ’99, from her hometown of Seattle to the Midwest, then back again to the West Coast. Her passion is now her profession; today, she is an award-winning film writer and director in Los Angeles.
Isaac-Young says her experiences at Washington University helped her build a solid creative foundation. When she arrived at the university in 1995, she immersed herself in the arts, earning degrees in both acting and drawing/printmaking. She appeared in several plays on campus; two of her favorites were Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde and Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.
She also attended a month-long “Shakespeare at the Globe” master class in London, offered annually through Washington University Performing Arts Department and Globe Education. There, she learned stagecraft with an intellectual emphasis on the Shakespearean text and history. “It was wonderful,” she recalls. “I directed a scene from King Lear on the Globe stage.”
After graduation, Isaac-Young briefly lived in Chicago and worked as an assistant dramaturge at the highly respected Steppenwolf Theatre. In January 2001, she moved to Los Angeles and enrolled in the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. While there, she learned the art and business of filmmaking by taking on duties as writer, director, art director and art production assistant, among others, for a variety of film projects she and her classmates created.
By the time she graduated from USC in 2004 with an MFA in film production, Isaac-Young was already winning accolades for her work. In fact, she was the only student in USC’s lengthy film school history to be awarded school funding for directing both a documentary film and a fiction film.
Her 24-minute documentary, Foster Stories, is a moving exploration of the foster-care system in Southern California. In the film, Isaac-Young, off-camera, asks questions of the four young adults being featured. All four were then, or had previously been, in foster care — and their answers paint an emotional portrait of childhoods spent moving from home to home.
“The response to the film was amazing — it really changed a lot of things for me,” Isaac-Young says.
Foster Stories won the award for Best Short Documentary at the 2005 Urbanworld Film Festival in New York City. Independent Film Channel purchased both Foster Stories and Isaac-Young’s fiction film, Little Valerie.
In 2008, Isaac-Young began developing the script for what she hopes will be her first feature-length film, The Prettiest Girl.
“Meg [LeFauve] helped me focus on being the writer I truly want to be,” Isaac-Young says. “The lab was a safe place to show my work and be vulnerable in my writing process.”
In 2009, she was chosen to participate in the prestigious five-week Screenwriter’s Lab at Film Independent, a nonprofit arts organization that produces the Independent Spirit Awards and the Los Angeles Film Festival. Meg LeFauve (writer and independent producer of the film Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys) served as her lab mentor.
“Meg helped me focus on being the writer I truly want to be,” Isaac-Young says. “The lab was a safe place to show my work and be vulnerable in my writing process.”
In early 2010, Isaac-Young attended the intensive eight-week Film Independent Director’s Lab. This time, her assigned mentor was Catherine Hardwicke (director of acclaimed coming-of-age film Thirteen and the blockbuster vampire movie Twilight). “It was a wonderful experience — she watched me directing actors in a quietly tense scene from The Prettiest Girl,” Isaac-Young says. “Catherine’s question, ‘What’s underneath it?’ really made me think. I decided to see what would happen if I flipped the tone and rewrote the scene directly answering her question. It received a deeply engaged response from others. Now, I ask that question of everything I write. Though often the strongest choice is to keep certain things under the surface, it’s nice to remember the potential power of showing the emotional underbelly.”
Hoping to someday earn a living through her art, Isaac-Young is strongly committed to the work.
“On a typical day, it’s just me and my laptop,” she says. “But, I feel good things are coming my way.”
Lisa Cary is a freelance writer based in St. Louis.
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