Sarah Gyllenstierna was born in Stockholm in 1971. Immediately after finishing high school she moved to New York to look for work in film production. After completing a Super-8 filmmaking class at the School of Visual Arts she managed to land an internship on Spike Lee's Jungle Fever. Sarah has subsequently worked on three more Spike Lee films - Malcolm X, Crooklyn, and He Got Game - first as a production assistant and later as an assistant director.

After a break from working in film to earn a Bachelor of Arts in English at Barnard College, Columbia University, from where she graduated summa cum laude in 1996, Sarah began to focus on writing and directing, all the while continuing to gain experience from different film productions.

In addition to working as as assistant director, Sarah has produced two feature films, the award-winning The Arrangement, directed by H. H. Cooper, and Limousine Drive, directed by the Japanese director Masashi Yamamoto. In 1997 Sarah returned to Sweden to make the short film Encounters, which played at several festivals, including Gšteborg Film Festival and Mannheim-Heidelberg International Film Festival in 1998.

Since then, Sarah's feature-length screenplay Resurrections was selected as a finalist for the ABC New Talent Development Fellowships in 2002 and a semi-finalist in the 2002 IFP Market. More recently Sarah made a short film, I'm Your Man which was funded by the Swedish Film Institute and SVT (Swedish Television) for a production grant. The film premiered at the Göteborg Film Festival in January 2004 and screened at the Nashville Film Festival as well as the local Swedish festivals Next Stop Rinkeby and Mölnbo Filmfestival and on Swedish television.

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