Biography

Gayla Kraetsch Hartsough, Ph.D., Writer/Producer of Los Angeles, has written award-winning feature and short film screenplays. Most of her work focuses on social issues to increase awareness through stories.

Her feature screenplays have won several film festival and screen-writing contests. Today, she has three of her features optioned, including Heloise+Abelard (an historical romance), Blood and Water (a political thriller), and Year of the Caterpillar (a coming-of-age story). Alison Eastwood is to direct Year of the Caterpillar.

Her shorts have gone to 50 festivals to date, including Los Angeles Shorts Fest, Cannes Short Film Corner, New Orleans, Sedona, Newport beach, Phoenix, Denver Starz, Tribeca's American Now+Here Program, Broad Humor, and Palm Springs International Short Film Festival (1 of 320 selected out of 3,200 submissions). Her short "Slap" won audience, best of the fest, and other designations at the festivals. Shorts International is Slap's distributor.

Gayla is also an entrepreneur, president of KH Consulting Group, a management consulting firm that has served 200 clients in 25 states and 9 foreign countries. She is also adjunct faculty at the University of Southern California, Sol Price School of Public Policy.

She has a BS degree, Northwestern University, School of Communication; a Masters degree, Tufts University; Ph.D. and Masters degrees, University of Virginia; and a certificate in feature screen-writing from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).

She is a Women in Film (WIF) member, served on the Northwestern University Entertainment Alliance (NUEA) Board for three years, and is an active member in the University of Virginia Feature Screenwriters' Group.

She's married and raised a Millennial son. She's traveled to more than 50 countries.
- IMDb mini biography by: Gayla Kraetsch Hartsough