Birgit Syran Myaard
                    (BEERgit saRAN MYerd)

A finally-grown-up third culture kid and first-generation Norwegian-
American born near Chicago, Birgit has lived more than half her life
overseas (in Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Pakistan,
Thailand, Austria, and Australia) and traveled to 55+ countries. She
speaks Norwegian, German, and French. Birgit now calls the shores
of Lake Michigan home, where she lives with her diplomat-turned-
retiree husband.

After a decade in the U.S. government—including a stint as a CIA Soviet
biographic analyst—Birgit shifted course to embrace motherhood and
creative work. A surprising pivot from piano tuning to storytelling led to
her first screenplay, TRUE BLUE WIDOW, a post‑9/11 thriller that
became a Creative World Awards finalist and a Fresh Voices “Best
Foreign Screenplay” nominee. 

Birgit built on her initial success with PETRIFIED, which drew on Norwegian tales of trolls she heard as a child. It won the Family category and was awarded 8th place, overall, in the 2012 Emerging Screenwriters contest.

THE HAND OF A WOMAN (renamed A WOMAN’S HAND), her $10,000 Kairos Prize–winning, biblically inspired epic based on Judges 4–5 also received a “Best Scene Table Read” nod at WILDsound’s Female Film Festival.

Her poetic adaptation ELLIDA, drawn from her own translation of Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea, earned 65 festival awards, holds a 4.5‑star audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and was praised as “haunting, beautiful, and poignant” by The Monthly Film Festival.

Birgit is now focused on marketing her recently completed screenplay, GENTLEMEN OF THE GRIDIRON, a character-driven biopic of Walter Chauncey Camp, the “Father of American Football.”
 
Honored by the International Screenwriters' Association in 2024 as a Top 25 Screenwriter to Watch, she endeavors to write with grit, soul, and a global perspective.

Her ISA profile can be viewed here: https://www.networkisa.org/profile/birgit-myaard
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