Kit Zauhar

Zauhar was born in Philadelphia. Her mother is a Chinese immigrant who came to the United States to study medicine, while her father is white. She has one sister. In high school, Zauhar directed her first short film, titled It Was Fall.

Zauhar graduated from New York University in 2017. She later enrolled in a Master of Fine Arts program in nonfiction writing at Columbia University, but left the program after a year amid the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic to finish work on her first feature film.^[3][4]

While attending NYU, Zauhar wrote and directed the short film Helicopter, released in 2016.^[5] Her 2018 short film Terrestrials, about a device that allows people to meet for anonymous sex on the metaphysical plane, was recognized with the Best Screenplay award in the International Short Film Competition during the 2019 Fantasia International Film Festival.^[6][7]

Zauhar wrote, directed, and starred in her debut feature, Actual People, an autofictional work inspired by her her final week at NYU which premiered at the 2021 Locarno Film Festival.^[4][8][2] Her 2023 film This Closeness, about a weekend in the life of a young couple renting a home from an awkward host in Philadelphia, debuted at the South by Southwest Film Festival; Factory 25 acquired the film for a limited theatrical run the following year.^[2][9]

In June 2024, Variety reported that Zauhar would adapt a film adaptation of the 2010 Sheila Heti novel How Should a Person Be? for Neon Heart Productions, the company that produced This Closeness.^[10]