Sex and the City Writer Elisa Zuritsky ’92 Returns to Vassar With Lessons on Creativity, Friendship, and Resilience

Zuritsky, who, along with writing partner Julie Rottenberg, wrote for both Sex and the City and its sequel, And Just Like That…, described her creative process and answered wide-ranging questions during a morning visit to Professor Dara Greenwood’s Media Studies senior seminar (MEDS 310) and an afternoon tea at the President’s House. In the evening, Zuritsky attended a private dinner with President Elizabeth H. Bradley and 15 lucky students selected by lottery.

“Elisa was down to earth, candid, funny, and so generously engaged with the students, even offering them her email to stay in touch,” Greenwood said. “They each had a chance to describe their thesis project ideas to her and then hear her talk about her career trajectory and the ups and downs of writing for television.”

Leah Nowak ’27, a student in the class, called the experience “incredibly helpful,” adding that “it’s always good to talk to someone who has your dream career.”

At the tea, Zuritsky, who most recently worked on the Amazon YA drama Every Year After, described how she and Rottenberg met as nine-year-olds at a Saturday morning acting class in Philadelphia and grew into young adults who both loved to write. “We always dreamed as kids of making things together one day, but we didn’t know how that would ever happen,” she said.

When they were in their twenties, said Zurtitsky, “We finally decided to take a few weeks and try and write something together, and we wrote a little romantic comedy that no one has ever read.” Both got jobs unrelated to their fledgling screenwriting partnership—Zuritsky as a writer for a humor magazine put out by Nickelodeon and Rottenberg in animation.

In the course of her work, Rottenberg met a production executive who asked if she had any TV show ideas. “Julie thought about it and said, ‘Well, I do, but I would have to come back with my writing partner.’ We wound up having this meeting, and we pitched a few ideas, and we met executives, and they liked the ideas, and they wanted to work with us,” Zuritsky recalled. “We looked at each other and said, ‘Are we doing this?’” And just like that … the two became a professional writing partnership. Within the year, they were hired as staff writers for Sex and the City.

Bradley then opened the discussion to the students packing the room, who asked Zuritsky everything from how her approach to work and creativity changed after being part of such a huge success to what personal traits she finds useful in her career.

“I think I had a lot to learn after that job,” Zuritsky said of her work on Sex and the City. “It was so exciting, so thrilling. It opened a lot of doors afterwards. But it didn’t diminish the work that we had to keep putting in creatively to keep the engine going. Most things in entertainment don’t actually ever see the light of day, which I didn’t fully understand. So there’s a lot of brushing yourself off and going, ‘Wow, that’s a bummer. What else are we doing?’”

For this reason, she said, “optimism and resiliency” are the traits she has found most useful in her line of work. “The ability to brush yourself off and have new ideas is kind of everything. Being able to laugh when things really suck, and finding whatever ridiculous thing is funny about a bad situation, is life-saving. So look for people who help you do that!” A good place to find such people, she said, is in college.

When asked if she felt that having a broad-based liberal arts education, as opposed to a more vocational focus early on, had helped her in her career, Zuritsky said that it had—noting that focusing too narrowly on the entertainment world too soon might have left her with fewer good stories to tell. “I think having experiences outside of entertainment will really help you as a writer once you’re actually trying to make a living at it,” she told the students. “You’ll have more material to draw from if you diversify your work experiences and your classes.”