Cynthia Lowen

Cynthia Lowen is an award-winning filmmaker and writer. She is the producer and writer of Bully, a feature documentary following a “year in the life” of America’s bullying crisis, which she developed, produced, and wrote in partnership with Emmy and Sundance Award-winning director, Lee Hirsch. Filmed over the course of the 2009/2010 school year, Bully opens a window into the pained and often endangered lives of bullied kids, revealing a problem that transcends geographic, racial, ethnic, and economic borders.

Lauded by reviewers, Bully was awarded a prestigious Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia Award for excellence in journalism, as well as the 2013 Stanley Kramer Award from the Producers Guild of America, among other honors. Drawing on Bully’s success, the filmmakers created The Bully Project Social Action Campaign, a collaborative effort in partnership with multiple organizations, foundations, brands, and corporate sponsors, sharing a commitment to ending bullying and transforming society. The film and campaign have garnered support from such prominent voices as Anderson Cooper, Ellen DeGeneres, Kelly Ripa, Meryl Streep, Katie Couric, Justin Bieber, and many others. Featured at several prominent summits on education and school climate, Bully was screened at the White House in 2012. The impact of this documentary and the associated social action campaign was recently explored in Anderson Cooper’s one-hour special, The Bully Effect, which premiered on CNN.

Through her work on Bully, Lowen has lectured extensively on bullying and school climate and culture. She is the co-author of The Essential Guide to Bullying, Prevention and Intervention with Cindy Miller, a school social worker, psychotherapist, educator, and parent consultant. Lowen is also the editor of Bully: An Action Plan for Teachers and Parents to Combat the Bullying Crisis. She has authored several articles and has appeared widely on television shows and radio programs to speak on the subject.

In addition to her work in bullying, Lowen is an award-winning poet and winner of the 2012 National Poetry Series for her collection, The Cloud That Contained the Lightning. Using the character of J. Robert Oppenheimer, known as the “father of the atomic bomb,” as a jumping-off point, the collection explores the enduring legacy of nuclear weapons. Of these poems, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes wrote, “No biographer in 600 pages has come closer to understanding him [Oppenheimer]—and the bomb—than Cynthia Lowen in these subtle, resonant poems.”

On the basis of her writing, Lowen was awarded the 2013 Women Authoring Change Fellowship. She is also the recipient of the Discovery/Boston Review Prize and was recognized as a Best New Poet of 2008.

Cynthia Lowen grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts and attended Colorado College, receiving her MFA in creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College.