Elizabeth Pyjov was born in Moscow, Russia and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. Elizabeth was a Romance Languages and Literatures major and Classics minor at Harvard University, where she was an Arts editor for the Harvard Crimson and had a foreign film column. Her senior thesis was about meta-cinema in the auteur film. In the past she has worked for Italian television at RAI International in Rome, the United Nations in Geneva, and for Porto dei Poeti, an international poetry festival in Cesenatico, Italy. Elizabeth is fluent in five languages and has worked or studied in six different countries. She is currently working as a translator of Italian poetry and writes about the Arts for Highbrow Magazine.

Q & A with Elizabeth:

Why did you decide to become a writer?

It makes each day so much more fulfilling.

Who are a few of your favorite authors?

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Aristophanes, Ovid, Stendhal, Jorge Luis Borges, Luigi Pirandello, Tom Stoppard, Mark Twain.

What’s the worst job/assignment you’ve ever had?

Fighting with Sudan’s government for women’s right through the Global Justice Center. They gave us a terribly hard time.

Which is your favorite city in the U.S.?

New York City – love the energy and the arts scene.

What’s your all-time favorite film?

All of Federico Fellini’s movies, especially 8 ½. Fellini redefined and blurred the line between life, art, and cinema. Some other favorite directors are Woody Allen, Andrei Tarkovsky, François Truffaut, Sofia Coppola, François Ozon, Pedro Almodóvar, and Darren Aronofsky.

Which newspapers/magazines do you read regularly?

The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Paris Review, Le Monde, Cahiers du Cinéma, El País, Corriere della Sera, The New Times, Новое Время, and Эхо Москвы.

Would you rather become the next editor-in-chief of the New Yorker or replace Jon Stewart as host of the “Daily Show”?

Editor-in-chief of the New Yorker.

What are your favorite “highbrow” pastimes?

Literature, movies, music, art. Moving to new countries. Writing. Also, every good opportunity I get, opera, ballet, and theatre.