Bio

Kristen “KD” Dávila is an Oscar-nominated Mexican-American director and screenwriter, who started out her storytelling career writing Harry Potter fanfiction as a child. She went on to attend Princeton University, where she learned Arabic, studied a lot of wars, and was accepted into Princeton’s Creative Writing Program. Upon graduating with a degree in Near Eastern Studies, she moved back home to LA. There, she earned her MFA in Writing for Screen and Television from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. She went on to be a 2015-16 Universal Pictures Emerging Writers Fellow and a 2016 Film Independent Project Involve Fellow. She is the writer of Emergency (2022), the feature film based on the award-winning short of the same name. She directed and the Academy Award nominated sci-fi short Please Hold, which she co-wrote with her writing and life-partner Levin Menekse.