Kim Adelman began her producing career with the indie feature, Just Friends. She then launched the Fox Movie Channel's short film program, where the 19 shorts she produced won 30+ awards and played over 150 film festivals worldwide, including the Sundance Film Festival four years in a row. In 2023, she returned to indie feature film producing with Hancock Park (in post production) while also associate producing the short Help is...on the Way? and acting in the short En Pointe.
Ms. Adelman currently teaches Low Budget Filmmaking at UCLA Extension, Writing the Short Film at Cal State LA, Cinema Production II at Mount Saint Mary's University, and Creative Producing 2 at the Seattle Film Institute. In 2014, she was named UCLA Extension's Entertainment Studies Instructor of the Year. In 2016, she won its Distinguished Instructor Award.
In addition to guest lecturing at USC, LMU, UC Irvine, and Cal State Fullerton, she has also taught filmmaking workshops across the US, Canada, and New Zealand. Most recently she led multiple creative writing workshops for kids at UCLA’s Hammer Museum via 826LA and filmmaking for teens at Pasadena’s Norton Simon Museum.
Over the past two decades, Ms. Adelman has also reported extensively on festivals and short films for Indiewire, co-programmed the American Cinematheque's annual Focus on Female Directors short film screening series for fifteen years, and co-founded FFC: the Female Filmmaking Collective. She has also been a jury member and/or a panel moderator at numerous international film festivals, including Sundance Next and the Los Angeles Film Festival during its final year.
Her short film book, Making it Big in Shorts, is on its third edition and has been published internationally in Spanish and Mandarin. The three pop culture books she wrote for Penguin Random House are The Girls Guide to Elvis, The Girls Guide to Country, and The Ultimate Guide to Chick Flicks. which was also published in Japanese.
She has recorded a five-part educational podcast on independent filmmaking for UCLA Extension and co-hosted the 15-episode movie adaptation podcast Book to Screen, available on Apple Podcasts. She has also appeared as a cinema expert in the ARTE documentary From Weepies to Chick Flicks, E!'s Hollywood & Sex special, and the DVD extras for Love Me Tender and Ghost. She was profiled for Women Transforming Media and recently appeared on Film Courage, Indie Film Hustle, and Selling Your Screenplay podcasts.
Ms. Adelman was also Director of On Air Creative Production for Style Network until that network shut down. She has worked at multiple cable networks and FAST channels including FX/FXM, E!, G4, PopTV, the Game Show Network, and Cinevault.
Kim Adelman is a native of Los Angeles, California and a proud UCLA alum. Her favorite film is What’s Up, Doc?, favorite singer Elvis Presley, and favorite word supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Ask her about the time she had lunch with a cannibal at Real Food Daily.
