Nic Kelman was born in Manhattan, moved to the UK when he was 12, and then returned to the United States to attend university at MIT. There he majored in Brain and Cognitive Science, learning from the likes of Stephen Pinker, Marvin Minsky, and Noam Chomsky, and minored in Film and Media Studies. In his final year, MIT awarded him the Burchard Scholarship, given for outstanding performance in both the arts and the sciences.

After completing his undergraduate work, he attended the Brown University Creative Writing MFA program on fellowship. He began his first novel, girls, as his thesis at Brown and the work was awarded Brown’s “James Assatly Award” for graduate fiction.

girls was published in hardcover in the U.S. in 2003 and in paperback in 2005. It was named one of the Best Books of the Year by both the San Francisco Chronicle and The New York Journal and went on to become an international bestseller, still available in over a dozen languages.

Video Game Art, Nic’s second book, was published in early 2006 by Assouline Publishing. Distributed globally in both Fre

nch and English, the lavishly illustrated Video Game Art attempts to lay the foundations for placing the art and design of video games in an art history context and was the first work of its kind.

Nic’s third book, the novel The Behavior of Light, was published in Italy by Fazi Editore in 2008 under the title, Il Comportamento Della Luce.

Nic’s fourth book, the illustrated novel, How To Pass As Human, was published by Dark Horse Books in 2015 and is currently under development for series.

Among other places, his writing and photography have appeared in Elle, Glamour, The Village Voice, BlackBook, The Kenyon Review, and The New York Tyrant, as well as various anthologies. He also wrote an online biweekly column about media and culture for two years for the now defunct “Giant Realm.”

Between 2009 and 2017, he focused primarily on writing for screen and television. He has sold scripts to the likes of Steven Spielberg, Roland Emmerich, Warner Brothers, Paramount, and ABC Studios and worked on narrative development with many other directors and companies such as the Russo Brothers and Netflix.

From 2017 to 2021 he served as Director of Entertainment Development at Wizards of the Coast, developing film, television, fiction, and comics with companies like Penguin Random House, Boom!, Netflix, Paramount, and eOne and bringing in talent like Brandon Sanderson and Peter Hamilton to work on Wizard’s and Hasbro properties like Dungeons and Dragons and GI Joe.
Currently, he has returned to working on his own material.

Firmly believing in Marcus Tulius Cicero’s comment, “a room without books is like a body without a soul,” Nic’s library packs every corner of his apartment, compacting the likes of Les Fleurs du Mal with The Ecology of Small Mammals or Folktales of New Orleans with The X-men Encyclopedia.