Iris Yamashita is a screenwriter nominated for an Academy Award for the movie Letters From Iwo Jima, directed by Clint Eastwood. Letters from Iwo Jima received a Golden Globe award for “Best Foreign Language Film” and was nominated for 4 Oscars®. Iris is the only female of Asian descent ever to have been nominated in the “original screenplay” category. She has also optioned or been assigned to various screenplays, working with internationally acclaimed directors such as Wayne Wang, Shekhar Kapur and Hideo Nakata.
Ms. Yamashita has taught screenwriting at UCLA, USC, CalTech and the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She has also been a judge or mentor for programs sponsored by the Writers Guild of America, Film Independent, the Korean Film Council, the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival and the San Francisco International Asian Film Festival, and is a member of the advisory board for the Asian Culture & Media Alliance.
Currently, Iris is the writer and creative consultant on an originally conceived stage show, which is scheduled to debut at Tokyo Disneyland in the summer of 2016. She continues to work on projects for both film and television.
