Westbrook

Alexander Kaluzhsky is a filmmaker born in Odessa, Ukraine who immigrated to the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn, NY with his family in the late 80’s. He studied filmmaking at S.V.A. and N.Y.U., and Theater at the Actor’s Center under the guidance of teachers from Juilliard, Yale, Harvard, and Tisch.

Under his production company Apropos Films he has produced the features The Missing Person directed by Noah Buschel, starring Academy Award Nominees Michael Shannon and Amy Ryan which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, was released in theaters, named one of IFC’s Top 10 films and nominated for a Gotham Award in 2009; and Weakness written & directed by Michael Melamedoff, starring Bobby Cannavale, Josh Charles, and Lily Rabe, which premiered at the Austin Film Festival in 2010.

As writer/ director he has made the short films- Westbrook recently completed; I.Aria, Arkadya, a winner at Hammertonail.com’s Short Film Contest judged by Sundance’s Mike Plante, and Beast of the Southern Wild writer/director Benh Zeitlin; The Visitors, an experimental short form documentary for which he received the 2010 Blueprint Fellowship and was screened as part of CURRENTS 2013 at the Santa Fe Museum of Art; Bad Moon Rising which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, and Apropos which played at New Filmmakers New York. He has also edited the films Notes on Blue by Moyra Davey, commissioned by the Walker Art Center to commemorate Derek Jarman, Hemlock Forest for the Biennale de Montreal, and worked with filmmakers such as Bruce Weber and Ondi Timoner.

As actor he has worked on films such as The Taking of Pelham 123 directed by Tony Scott; Solitary Man produced by Steven Soderbergh; You and I directed by Roland Joffe; and the indie The Brightest Star, directed by Maggie Kiley, which premiered at the 2013 Austin Film Festival and was released in theaters around the country. He is currently in development on two feature length films centering around his family, and was invited to participate in the 51st New York Film Festival’s Artist Academy. He is the co-founder of Honey Ramka, an artist run gallery space in Bushwick, Brooklyn, an active member of the Brooklyn Filmmaker’s Collective, and a professor of Cinema within the CUNY College System and a visiting professor at institutions like Columbia University, The New School, and N.Y.U.