Having grown up in Pittsburgh, Carl Kurlander went to Los Angeles in 1982 after
winning the MCA-Universal Studios Scholar Award while attending Duke University.
Carl subsequently worked in Hollywood for two decades as a screenwriter (St.
Elmo's Fire) and television writer/producer (Saved By The Bell) writing
screenplays under contract for Columbia, Paramount, Universal, Twentieth Century
Fox, Orion, and Disney Studios, and writing and producing over 150 episodes of
television for NBC, Fox, and CBS. In the fall of 2001, he returned to his
hometown for what he and his wife believed would be a one-year Hollywood
sabbatical to teach at the University of Pittsburgh. Instead, they stayed in
Pittsburgh, believing it a better place to raise their young daughter--a journey
which ended up landing Carl a guest spot on The Oprah Winfrey Show, for of all
things, moving to Pittsburgh.
Since his return, Carl has produced the Mid-Atlantic Emmy-nominated Steeltown
Entertainment Project featuring over a dozen of Pittsburgh's most successful
entertainment expatriates and The Road To The Kellys which documented students
participating in the Gene Kelly Awards. He has also co-founded and is the
Executive Producer of the non-profit Steeltown Entertainment Project whose
mission is to develop promising talent and to incubate meaningful and
commercially viable entertainment projects in Southwestern Pennsylvania by
connecting Pittsburghers working in the entertainment industry with the region's
human, cultural, educational and economic resources. Carl is currently a
Visiting Distinguished Senior Lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh where he
is producing a film with WQED on how Pittsburgh conquered polio. He is in
post-production on A Tale of Two Cities, a feature documentary about the city
which built America with its steel, conquered polio, and invented everything
from aluminum to the Big Mac, which is now, like a lot of cities, being
challenged to reinvent itself. (See www.thepittsburghmovie.com). The
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has twice named Carl as one of Pittsburgh's "Top 50
Cultural Forces."
