Andrea Meyer - Early Personal and Professional Life

Early Personal and Professional Life

Meyer grew up in Los Angeles, California. She went to college at University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and spent her junior year studying at the Sorbonne in Paris. After graduating from UCSB in 1990 with a BA in English with honors, Meyer traveled for six months in Europe, eventually getting a job bartending in a wine bar in London. She then moved to Paris, where she spent two years teaching English and doing translations. Meyer returned to the United States in 1993 to get her Master's degree in English at New York University. Upon graduation, she had a series of jobs, assisting playwright, composer and theater director Elizabeth Swados and a theater and film literary agent at ICM, and then in film production, on such projects as a French-language feature, Tempéte dans un vers d'eau, the Discovery Channel documentary Nazis: The Occult Conspiracy and the HBO documentary Daughter of Suicide. She also produced and helped program the Avignon/New York Film Festival in 1998, as well as being a juror at numerous film festivals.

After leaving her job at ICM in 1995, Andrea shared a cab home from the airport with the editor in chief of Hamptons magazine, who offered her a job writing for the magazine. She wrote her first article about Todd Solondz's film Welcome to the Dollhouse. Andrea subsequently got assignments covering film for such publications as independent film website indieWIRE and eventually became a regular theater critic for The Resident, a New York weekly. Eventually, she became a regular contributor to such publications as Time Out New York and the New York Post. In 2000, Meyer became the Managing Editor of the IFC's print publication IFC Rant, which was published by indieWIRE. She worked there for two years before leaving to pursue a freelance writing career.