About

Vlad was born and raised in Virginia.

In high school, armed with a video camera, he directed numerous friends (and several faculty members) in two full-length serial dramas, taking inspiration from mystery classics such as Don’t Look Now and The Vanishing, the modern horror masterpiece Session 9, and the offbeat soap opera Twin Peaks. He screened episodes monthly before the student body, encouraging maximal audience participation.

After studying film (with a specialization in screenwriting) at the University of Colorado at Boulder and at Burlington College in Vermont, he returned to the South. During his time in New England, Vlad worked as a production technician for CBS News affiliate WCAX-TV, where he operated studio cameras, videotapes, and TelePrompters for live newscasts. He also spent several years as a music journalist, writing for heavy metal and hard rock publications such as Outburn magazine and Metal Underground.

After moving back to Virginia, where he met his future bride, Vlad broke into film in a collaboration with veteran Bollywood director Aashish Chanana, with whom he developed the characters and story for the latter’s first English-language feature. The resulting film, the terrorism thriller Afreen, which Vlad scripted, went on to sweep film festivals worldwide, winning forty-three awards and counting, plus many more nominations. Vlad and Chanana are collaborating again, this time on a similarly realistic script about global human trafficking.

Vlad is also a producing partner in the fledgling independent production company Strange Weather Pictures with his friends Scott Bruffey and Patrick Dolan. They are currently developing their debut feature, a zombie-themed horror-comedy in the vein of From Dusk Till Dawn and Reservoir Dogs titled Black Magic Rising.

Vlad inherited a great love of history from his parents, and a fascination with aviation from his career-pilot father. This, along with his addiction to classic disaster melodrama, provided the inspiration for Vlad’s first book, the first nonfiction work in four decades to fully recount the deadliest airline accident in the United States (and the deadliest U.S. aviation disaster until the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks): American Airlines Flight 191 in Chicago, Illinois on May 25, 1979. Since January of 2019, Vlad has been hard at work researching Flight 191, both on the ground in the Chicago area and remotely via web and phone, and building an army of participants and supporters, including friends and relatives of victims aboard the doomed DC-10.

Vlad and his wife divide their time between Tampa, Florida and his log cabin in the Blue Ridge Highlands of southwestern Virginia. He tends to keep much to himself, but if you’re lucky, you can spot him voraciously devouring any number of books on economics, history, philosophy, or religion, or a good old-fashioned potboiler. You might catch him at target practice at the shooting range, or headbanging to metal in his car while slowly going deaf. If you love mountains as much as he does, you might come across him hiking, fishing, or hunting in the Blue Ridge, and he can assure you that when he’s up there, he’s far more productive than Jack Torrance in The Shining.