Born in New York City, raided in upstate New York; educated at Harvard (US history). American independent filmmaker who established himself in the 1990s as an auteur of distinctively talky and thoughtful comedy-dramas. A child of privilege and illustrious lineage -- his great-great-grandfather helped explore the Rio Grande; his financier great-grandfather helped start Citibank; his father worked in the Truman and Kennedy administrations -- Stillman accepted only $2,000 from his family to start out after his graduation from Harvard in 1973. Though intrigued by film and TV production, he found himself in a training program at Doubleday where he was rotated between various departments before ending up in editorial. Stillman went on to become executive editor of a daily world news summary, while writing freelance fiction and journalism. He entered the film industry in the early 1980s as a foreign sales representative for Spanish films. Stillman also often appeared in these features in small comic parts as quirky or obnoxious Americans. In 1989, Stillman made his first feature, METROPOLITAN (1990), a low-budgeted yet highly polished portrait of Manhattan's East-side debutante set. Deftly observed and gently satirical, the film was a hit on the festival circuit, earned Stillman an Academy Award nomination for best original screenplay, and grossed an impressive $3 million. It also attracted the attention of Hollywood in the form of Castle Rock Pictures. The top brass expressed interest in funding BARCELONA while giving the neophyte filmmaker creative control and final cut. Castle Rock provided $4 million for BARCELONA (1994), another droll, dialogue-driven character study. Inspired in part by Stillman's surprise over his Spanish friends' hostile reaction to An Officer and a Gentleman (1982), the film detailed the personal and political misadventures of a mismatched pair of American cousins in post-Franco Spain. Stillmans's subsequent projects have been few: He directed a 1996 episode of "Homicide: Life on the Street", and he wrote, produced and directed THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO (1998). In 2000, Stillman moved to Paris. He is currently working on RED AZALEA and has another film, LITTLE GREEN MEN, in development.  Nominated for Writing - Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen 1990: METROPOLITAN 1 nomination