Elana Golden Photo: Ivan Strasburg

… teaches writing through the use of the personal story for the sake of peacemaking and beauty.  She founded the Los Angeles based Writing Studio™ in January 2000, and since then has taught over 2500 hundred classes, workshops and individual sessions in creative, personal writing to experienced and beginning writers, screenwriters, as well as coached many actors for auditions and parts.

In addition to the ongoing weekly classes at the Writing Studio’s permanent location in Los Angeles, Elana has taught her workshops in Colorado, Arizona, the Bay Area, and at the Skirball Cultural Center of Los Angeles where she is returning to teach in the summer of 2008.  She also worked with Palestinian and Jewish high school students from Israel/Palestine using creative writing as part of a peacemaking training program, and with Palestinian women in Orange County.

As a writer, teacher, theater and film director, Elana seeks to inspire a creative process from the heart in all forms of writing and performing arts.

Since childhood Elana has loved stories.  Not just fairy tales or moral tales but the ones her parents told her about their own childhood on the banks of the Danube river and Carpati mountains of Romania.  Throughout her life she's invited people to share with her their most intimate and difficult moments, and she began to see life - her own and others' - as a story. Realizing the cathartic experience inherent in the artistic expression of one's "wound", as well as ecstasy, she began to teach writing, using her own life journey as inspiration.

Elana holds a B.A. in film from New York University where she directed an award-winning short film, The Open Window, and an M.A. in spiritual psychology from the University of Santa Monica, where the idea for The Writing Studio™ was conceived.

Born in Bucharest, Romania, Elana immigrated to Israel with her parents when she was still a child.  As a teen, shortly after the 1967 War, she spent a month in a summer school in Switzerland where her best friends were Arabs, Muslims and Palestinians.  That summer made her a peacemaker.  Back in Israel, she became part of the peace movement.  In 1974 she came to San Francisco to be part of the counterculture.  Later, she traveled throughout India.

For many years Elana worked on films in New York and Los Angeles as script-supervisor, script consultant and editor, always, in one way or another, dealing with – story.  She worked with such directors as Chris Menges, Mick Jackson and John Mackenzie, and regards them as great inspiration.  Her teachers - Deena Metzger for creative writing, healing and dream work, Syd Field and Tom Schlesinger for screenwriting, Milton Katselas for directing and acting, Jean Houston for mythology, philosophy and social artistry, and Gurumayi Chidvilasananda for meditation - are all held in deep gratitude.

Elana wrote and directed several theatrical pieces at the Beverly Hills Playhouse and is currently developing two feature length screenplays she intends to direct – Epiphany and The Sultan’s Horse.  She's also compiling a book of her short stories, Packed Suitcases, and a book on creative writing, Writing Heals and Transforms.  Elana is a meditator, student of Eastern philosophies and indigenous cultures, consultant in spiritual psychology, public speaker, peace and human-rights activist, Reiki master, and has taught meditation in prisons.  Her own artistic evolution leads her to believe in the affirming and transformational power of writing and art.

Elana lives with her two beautiful cats in a tower apartment in Los Angeles, where The Writing Studio™ is located, and where the walls are infused with the energy of writing.