Slow Down

Liv Prior Colliander is a Danish director and writer based in Los Angeles. She recently earned her MFA in directing from the prestigious American Film Institute, where she was the sole recipient of the Alessandro F. Uzielli Scholarship. Liv has also received awards from Hempels Medarbejder Foundation, Knud Højgaards Foundation, and Nordisk Film Foundation. Her thesis film DRYLAND has screened festivals internationally. It won best US Short at Laughlin International Film Festival, got a honorable mention: Outstanding Student Film from Nevada Women's Film Festival, won Best Supporting Actress at California WOmen's Film Festival and was at the Reykjavik International Film Festival as a 2016 Golden Egg Finalist

Over the past decade before attending AFI, Liv worked her way up through the Danish film, commercial and television industry, working beside some of the country’s finest filmmakers, and earning broad experience at Denmark’s most renowned production companies: Nordisk Film, Zentropa, Fridthjof Film, ASA Film, Moland, Bacon CPH, Endemol, and many others.

Liv graduated from the European Film College in 2006, followed by studies at the Short and Documentary Film School in Denmark as a directing fellow in 2006 and 2008. Liv has written and directed over ten short films, among them MANDEN UDENFOR (Odd Man Out), starring Søren Pilmark and several other celebrated Danish actors. The film premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival, and aired on Danish television. Liv has also directed commercials and music videos.

Since graduating, Liv has been part of the admission comity at AFI Conservatory, interviewing and selecting the 2016 and 2017 Directing fellows in collaboration with the discipline head, the dean and other faculty. She also worked as a judge at the European Student Film Festival 2016 in Geneva and lead workshops in Directing and personal storytelling for the new generation of filmmakers. She was part of the WIF Mentorship Program in 2016 and was in the Reykjavik International Film Festival 2016 Talent Lab.

Liv is currently writing a true crime-drama TV pilot as well as her first feature. Through her films, Liv is interested in exploring humanity’s fundamental loneliness, and how that loneliness affects our struggles to fit into the rules of society. She is drawn to characters with identity crises who fight, often humorously, to hold themselves together in the face of our chaotic world. When she is not on set or hiding away writing on her projects, Liv travels the world and wonders what her life would have been as an astronaut and about what secrets hides out there in the far away universe...