Heather Ferreira

Heather Ferreira was born in New Jersey in 1968, the daughter of a Nixon Era Intelligence operative who later designed royal and military infrastructure during the 1980s for the Saudi Kingdom in Riyadh for the US Army Corps of Engineers under former President Ronald W. Reagan, and his partly Japanese schoolteacher wife. A self-described "military brat", she is also the third cousin of former Secretary of State and APNSA Condoleezza Rice and grew up near various Army and Air Force bases all throughout America. After being taught cinematography as a teen by former Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese camera operator Peter Salim (dec.), whom she met on the set of an NBC series, and in exchange for action scripts written for Salim to have directed, Ferreira at his advice began working in Hollywood as a D-girl at the William Felber Agency in 1988, writing feature screenplays on the side. In 1995, an action script she wrote under a pen name was optioned then purchased and produced by producer Joseph Merhi. This brought her to the attention of Lee Daniels and Kerry Jones, who briefly managed her until she became agented by Vince Gerardis for The Agency in Century City. In 2010 she was accepted by New York University. There Ferreira studied film. While there, she wrote the futuristic Mafia film trilogy "Gangsterland", which was optioned in 2010 by Harvey Keitel and his company Goatsingers, then directed the award-winning NYU short film "Surprise Surprise, Mr. Conovy". The film's raw mob violence and intensity and its win of the the Lucerne International Film Festival's Award of Merit brought Ferreira to the attention of Martin Scorsese's DP emeritus Michael Chapman, ASC, who began advising her shooting style and mentoring her career. In 2009, Ferreira began developing "Movieopolis", an homage series about Scorsese and Coppola and set in Hollywood in the 1970s. She shot multiple episodes, and it has interest from two networks. Ferreira is single and has no children, and lives in Southern California.