Karen (Ren) Dillon is a filmmaker, writer, and educator who relocated from Abu Dhabi in the UAE, to Montpelier, Vermont. She received her BFA in 1990, from the School of Visual Arts and her MFA in Film Directing, Writing, and Producing from Columbia University in 2005. She has worked in the film industry in both Los Angeles and New York City. Her screenplay, Birds With Teeth, a comedy about 19th-century paleontology, won an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Award and grant. Her films have been screened nationally and internationally at film festivals. She was the founding Editor of Blue Sky, Green Earth Magazine. At Al Roker Entertainment in NYC, she developed new television programming. Her other passions include fiction writing, scuba diving, knitting, yoga, and sustainable living and farming. Filmmaking allows her to dig deeply into a constant stream of new projects, subjects, and ideas. She taught at Columbia University, the Kansas City Art Institute, the Ross School, Katharine Gibbs College, NYFA at Princeton, and Higher Colleges of Technology in the UAE, and she was Chair of Video Production at the Art Institute of New York City. Her former students, and the work they have gone on to create, are some of the achievements of which she is most proud.