Ira Sachs was born in Memphis in 1965. His first feature, The Delta (1997), was screened at Sundance, Toronto, and Rotterdam, and was distributed in the US by Strand Releasing. Sachs was the recipient of the Emerging Talent award at the 1997 LA Outfest, and was awarded a 1999 Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship. He was also a 2001 Fellow at the MacDowell Artist Colony, and has made several shorts, including Vaudeville and Lady (Sundance 95). With Forty Shades of Blue, Sachs participated in the Screenwriter's Lab at the Sundance Institute. He is presently at work on Marriage, a suspense film set in San Francisco in the 1940s, written in collaboration with Oren Moverman (co-writer on Jesuss Son and Todd Haynes' upcoming Bob Dylan project, Im Not There).