Eliza McNitt

Eliza McNitt is an American writer and director who first became known for virtual reality and science-themed storytelling. Wikipedia lists her as active since 2013, and her earlier work includes the documentary Requiem for the Honeybee, made in high school, the shorts Without Fire and Artemis Falls, and the VR piece Fistful of Stars about the Hubble Space Telescope. Without Fire, about a Navajo girl trying to heat her home to save her asthmatic mother, won festival prizes in 2014 and earlier received an Alfred P. Sloan production grant at NYU Tisch.

Fistful of Stars led to a meeting with Darren Aronofsky's company Protozoa, and then to SPHERES, a VR trilogy about the cosmos that Aronofsky executive produced. SPHERES premiered at Sundance, was acquired in a seven-figure deal, won the Grand Prize for VR at the Venice Film Festival and was an Emmy finalist for interactive media. Her work has been shown at Sundance, SXSW, Cannes, Tribeca, Telluride and Venice, and she was president of the immersive jury at Venice in 2025. She also co-writes science fiction with Lynn Renee Maxey, including Mars 2080, developed for Imagine Entertainment.

She wrote and directed Ancestra, the first short from Aronofsky's studio Primordial Soup in partnership with Google DeepMind, and the first of three planned shorts. It premiered at the Tribeca Festival on 13 June 2025. The film draws on her family archives and her mother's memory and is inspired by the day she was born, with a heart condition discovered at birth. It combines a live actress on a real set with generative visuals made with Google's Veo, plus a LoRA model trained on her late father's photographs, which her family had the rights to; an AI-generated baby was added to the live scene.

A profile says production took about ten weeks with roughly 200 people, and that the team went past text prompts, filming a physical object as video-to-video reference. She has said she plans a debut feature that uses AI in its pipeline. Tribeca described her as exploring the collision of science and art, from astronauts to astrophysics.