Shareen Blair Brysac is an author of non-fiction books and a former dancer, television producer/director/writer. Biography Brysac was born in Denver, Colorado, and graduated from Barnard College, Columbia University. While at Barnard, she attended the Juilliard School and danced as a member of the José Limón and Merce Cunningham Companies. After her graduation, she also appeared with the Paul Taylor Dance Company in Europe and with the New York City Opera ballet. In 1974 she began working for CBS News as a producer/director of documentaries for the network. Her documentaries 1968, American Dream, American Nightmare, The Cowboy, the Craftsman, and the Ballerina, and Juilliard and Beyond: A Life in Music, Once in Lifetime won five Emmys, a DuPont Citation, a George Foster Peabody Award, a Writers Guild Award, medals from New York and Chicago film festivals, and a special invitation to the Edinburgh Film Festival. From 1985 to 1987 she was first program manager for CUNY TV, the cable television station for the City University of New York and subsequently she was a member of the Media Faculty of the Borough of Manhattan Community College. In 1989, she founded and directed the Campus Programming Service designed to bring foreign programming to university television stations for which she received a Rockefeller Grant. Brysac is a past member of the American Guild of Musical Artists, the Directors Guild, the Writers Guild, the Teacher's Union, and Women in Film. She is currently a member of the Authors Guild. Writing In 1999, she was the co-author with her husband, Karl E. Meyer, of Tournament of Shadows: the Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia. It was chosen as a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times and was a finalist for the Lionel Gelber Prize for "the world's best non-fiction book in English that seeks to deepen public debate on significant global issues." It was republished with a new introduction in 2006 by Basic Books. Her biography, Resisting Hitler: Mildred Harnack and the Red Orchestra was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Biography Book of the Year and the German edition of the book published by Scherz Verlag was selected as one of the best books of the year by German reviewers. Kingmakers: the Invention of the Modern Middle East appeared in 2008. Written together with her husband, it was chosen as one of the best books