Childhood
Elysia (Edwards) Van Deusen, grew up in assorted small Texas towns, the only child of a preacher. She spent hours climbing trees, pretending to be Violet from The Boxcar Children books. At night, she would lie awake for hours replaying conversations in her head or designing a dreamhouse with a library as magnificent as Belle’s in Beauty and the Beast.
When asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, Elysia would sometimes reply “everything.” Occasionally, she narrowed her professional aspirations to being a writer.
She became enamored with theater around age 8 when she sat in on high school one act play rehearsals, and she consistently performed in school plays and musicals until college.
College
Elysia attended the University of Texas at Austin, where she received a degree in Radio-TV-Film. She has said that aside from one course (Producing for Film and Television), she took all the “wrong” classes. This was mostly because she was squeezing them around a year abroad. During her junior year in Nantes, France, Elysia studied French poetry, art history, and theater. It was difficult and exhausting but absolutely worth it.
It was around then that Elysia fell in love with magical realism, though she didn’t have a name for it at the time. Films from that era that impacted her include Pleasantville, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Finding Neverland, Dancer in the Dark, Pan’s Labyrinth, L'Auberge Espagnole, and two of her all-time favorites: Moulin Rouge and Amélie.
Work
In 2005, Producer Jason Wehling hired Elysia to work on Chris Eska’s ultra low budget film August Evening. With a tiny crew and miniscule budget, Elysia’s responsibilities included decorating the sets, keeping track of the props, slating takes, and script supervising in a language she had never studied. Her first day on set, she was sent to the ER after being shocked by 220 voltage from a massive industrial fan. She was back at work the next day.
Elysia loved being on set and worked in a variety of roles in the following years. Key credits include assistant property master on Elvis and Annabelle, art department production assistant on Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, propmaster on The 2 Bobs, and uncredited work fabricating props and food styling for The Tree of Life. Her longest gig was at local video production company Arts+Labor where she performed a wide variety of administrative and production related tasks.
In 2011, she and her husband welcomed twins into the world, which abruptly curtailed Elysia’s professional life for several years. She did a brief, all-consuming stint as a coordinating producer on the final season of A&E’s reality TV show Shipping Wars. Eventually, she found time to pursue personal projects. Her blog Let’s Explore Art, feature screenplay Painterly, and short film Gut Punch were all written while her children were in school.
Quirks
Elysia’s brain never stops whirring, and she often delves into learning new things. She has read a fair amount about the Waldensians of northern Italy, prion diseases, medieval cookery, historical paint pigments, edible plants of central Texas, and the development of English from the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Her favorite podcast is Gastropod, about the science and history of food. She’s also listened to the entire back catalogue of Scriptnotes.
Frequent killer of plants, she continues gardening anyway. Since she struggles reading sheet music, she mostly improvises on the piano. She’s a confirmed homebody, yet actually enjoys facilitating meetings. There’s much she would like to accomplish, but she needs deadlines.
Elysia instinctively absorbs the emotions of others, which contributes to her belief that the world would be a better place if empathy were more widespread. She insists that storytelling and art are essential components of being human. She is interested in the way magical realism can elicit feelings that seem truer than those depicted through straightforward realism.
Elysia intends to learn, dabble, think, and create ad infinitum.
