Kim Krizan (born November 1, 1961) is an American writer and actress best known for originating the story and characters in the Before trilogy with her writing on Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004), for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and a Writers Guild Award. The trilogy is based on characters she created with Richard Linklater. Krizan currently resides in Los Angeles, where she writes and teaches writing courses, most notably at UCLA. In the fall of 2021, she launched a video based writing class on Patreon.

Life and career

Krizan was featured in Linklater's Slacker (1990) and Waking Life (2001). She played the high school teacher, Ginny Stroud, in Dazed and Confused (1993). Krizan also appeared and wrote her monologue in Waking Life, which discusses language and love. In October 2012, Publishers Weekly spotlighted Krizan's self-publishing efforts on Kickstarter for her debut non-fiction book Original Sins: Trade Secrets of the Femme Fatale. The Kickstarter campaign was successfully funded in November 2012. In 2013, Krizan published an article in The Huffington Post revealing she had found a previously unpublished love letter written by Gore Vidal to the diarist Anaïs Nin. This letter contradicts Vidal's previous characterization of his relationship with Nin, showing that Vidal did have feelings for her that he later heavily disavowed in his autobiography, Palimpsest. Krizan did this research in the run up to the release of the latest volume of Nin's uncensored diary, Mirages, for which she wrote the foreword. In 2019 Krizan published Spy in the House of Anaïs Nin, an examination of long-buried letters, papers, and original manuscripts Krizan found while doing archival work in Nin's Los Angeles home. In the fall of 2021, Krizan brought her writing class online with the debut of "The Magic Hour with Kim Krizan" hosted on Patreon.