Cynthia Stephens is a writer, former academic, and corporate communications strategist whose career spans film and television production, higher education, and international consulting.
Originally hired as an English professor, she was recruited early in her academic career to develop and teach cinema studies courses. Over the next fifteen years, she taught screenwriting, film aesthetics, documentary film, literary adaptations, film history, and writing for film, radio and television. She was later appointed to a state task force to develop film curriculum for writers, producers, and directors in the state of Florida. Realizing the expense of such a program at that time, Stephens and her fellow committee members recommended consolidating film instruction to only one Florida university.
Anticipating major structural changes in film education as Florida sought to build a commercial film industry, Stephens transitioned from academia into professional film and video production. She served as marketing director at Florida Production Group, a film and video production company, where she also wrote, directed, and produced long-format corporate marketing videos. She later founded her own communications consultancy working with major corporations from New York to Miami on public relations, marketing, and training initiatives.
After closing her business to travel internationally, Stephens kept detailed journals with the intention of writing a novel. Her experiences became the foundation for Through the Gates of Heaven: A Journey into Nepal, a culturally immersive travel-adventure-romance novel inspired by a trek around the Annapurna Circuit in Nepal. The novel follows a group of strangers who meet in Kathmandu and whose journey through the Himalayas profoundly transforms them.
Stephens is currently seeking literary representation to further refine the manuscript and bring the novel to a global market. Her work combines cinematic narrative techniques with cultural immersion, in the tradition of Eat, Pray, Love; Wild ; and Seven Years in Tibet.