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Stay Until Tomorrow is Writer/Director Laura Colella's second feature. It has been screened in numerous festivals and venues in the U.S., France, England, Germany, and Canada, winning awards such as "Best Independent Feature", "Special Jury Prize in Directing", "Festival Director's Award", and two "Best Actress" awards. With Stay Until Tomorrow, Laura was a Sundance Institute Directing Fellow, and spent five weeks at their Directing and Screenwriting Labs workshopping her screenplay. With this project, she was also: a three-year LEF Moving Image Fund Fellow; a Rockefeller Grant Nominee; a Sundance/NHK International Filmmakers Award Finalist; and a Writing Fellowship recipient from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. For the film’s production, the Sundance Institute arranged for donations from Panavision, Deluxe Film Laboratories, Kodak, Pacific Title, and EFILM.

In 1998, Laura completed her first feature Tax Day (16MM, 80 minutes). For this film she received a donation through the Sundance Institute of a camera package from AATON. Tax Day has appeared in numerous festivals, winning awards such as the “Breakthrough Award”, “Best Narrative”, and “Best First Feature”. It was also screened at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, New York’s Anthology Film Archives, Chicago Filmmakers, and several universities. In March 2001, Tax Day had a nine-city Southern Circuit tour through four southeastern states, and the following month had its broadcast debut on PBS. In May, it was one of a handful of features that Filmfestivals.com selected to “premiere” online and promote during the Cannes Film Festival.


Laura’s most recent short film Statuary (1995, 27 minutes) has been screened at over fifty venues internationally. For Statuary, Laura received ten festival awards, such as “Most Promising Filmmaker” and the “Eastman Kodak Best Experimental Film Award”. Laura is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard University. Two films she made as an undergraduate also played at over a dozen festivals, winning a handful of awards. Over the past several years, she has also made a series of short videos.

  

Laura has received grants and fellowships from The New England Foundation for the Arts, the LEF Foundation, Harvard University, the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. She is based in Providence, RI, where she has shot and/or directed films, music videos, and commercials. Laura has worked in camera departments for several feature and short films, and currently teaches Directing and Film Production as an adjunct faculty member at the Rhode Island School of Design.