European intellectual history
Historical study trains attention on contingency: ideas become institutions, inherited categories acquire authority, and political arrangements that later look inevitable were once choices.
WRITER · SCREENWRITER · PLAYWRIGHT · INDEPENDENT HISTORIAN · ENROLLED AGENT
A writer of lives,
histories, systems, and forms.
The work crosses fiction, film, theatre, intellectual history, archives, political economy, law, and tax practice without asking one discipline to erase the others.
The profile from the many-faced emblem is the site’s intentional visual author mark: one voice moving through multiple forms without reducing those forms to a single discipline.
PROFESSIONAL SNAPSHOT
One writer.
Several working languages.
- Current base
- Calais, Maine
- Recognition
- First Place · 2026 Scriptapalooza
- Featured work
- Literary sequences · award-winning screenplay · nonfiction · Franz Marc biography
- Formation
- UC San Diego · Caltech · Emory
- Professional practice
- IRS Enrolled Agent since 2004
- Current inquiries
- Representation · publication · production · translation · scholarship
The work begins where a system closes its file and a life continues. It returns because consequence, memory, and relation do not end when the paperwork does.
WHY THE WORK CROSSES FORMS
A record can preserve the shape
of an event and lose the person.
That problem appears differently in a novel, a screenplay, a courtroom file, a newspaper archive, a tax return, or a sacred story. The forms are not interchangeable. Moving among them reveals both their powers and their failures.
Fiction restores interiority. Film makes sequence and public collision physical. History tests retrospective certainty against what people could know at the time. Professional practice reveals how consequences are produced by classifications, deadlines, and records that appear neutral until someone must live inside them.
BIOGRAPHY
Formation is not
a list of credentials.
BaseCalais, Maine
Primary formsNovel · screenplay · theatre · nonfiction
Current recognitionFirst Place, 2026 Scriptapalooza Screenplay Competition
Professional practiceIRS Enrolled Agent
Liana Marie Sive is a writer, screenwriter, playwright, independent historian, archival researcher, and IRS Enrolled Agent based in Calais, Maine. Her original feature screenplay CASE 1638: RECALL, conceived and written in Machiasport and revised in Calais, won First Place in the 2026 Scriptapalooza Screenplay Competition.
She is the author of the completed supernatural-historical sequence The Schattendorf Echoes and the six-volume queer/trans literary cycle Wondrous Travels; the agent-ready book-length manuscript The Unnamed Daughter; the stage play Double or Nothing; CASE 1638: The Cinematic Machine; and three linked short stories of exactly 1,638 words each. She is developing RECALL as a literary novel.
Her illustrated biography Franz Marc: Religion, Art and Modern Europe follows religion, painting, artistic freedom, and Maria Marc’s independent work and judgment. English and German editions are in preparation with Kunstdorf Verlag. Sive’s interest in Marc began in high school and deepened during three months in Munich in 1981.
Her historical work includes a reconstruction of the 1927 Schattendorf murder trial and its European press afterlife from a 1,024-image archival corpus, as well as an economic history of Jonas Chickering and nineteenth-century American piano manufacture. Her tax scholarship grows from two decades of representation practice.
Sive’s work moves among love, family, history, political power, satire, faith, art, memory, and the pressure of systems that turn lives into categories, prices, records, or official versions. The recurring questions matter because people continue after explanation has declared itself complete.
INTELLECTUAL FORMATION
Four routes into
the same pressure.
Social science and game theory
Game theory sharpens the view of competing incentives, locally rational choices, strategic behavior, and outcomes nobody needed to intend in order to produce.
Law and economics
Law and economics focuses attention on how rules, burdens, remedies, incentives, and definitions change what particular people are able to do.
Tax representation and records
Two decades as an IRS Enrolled Agent provide daily contact with the human consequences of systems that translate households, work, property, time, and obligation into forms and calculations.
SELECTED RECOGNITION
Two dates.
Forty-two years apart.
Scriptapalooza Screenplay Competition
First Place for the original feature screenplay CASE 1638: RECALL, created and developed solely by Liana Marie Sive.
Official resultAward record and archived announcementRevelle College commencement
Special recognition for the undergraduate thesis July 15, 1927: The Cannae of Austrian Freedom.
A WRITING PRACTICE
Not one thesis.
A field of recurring tensions.
Intimacy
Marriage, family, desire, transition, inheritance, dependence, and the effort to remain related under institutional pressure.
Record
Forms, ledgers, affidavits, transcripts, advertisements, tax returns, stories, and the blanks that govern legibility.
Authority
Who is permitted to name what happened, decide what counts, price the object, or close the file.
Transformation
The self that changes, the relation that persists, and the system that demands a cleaner category than life can supply.
LITERARY · DRAMATIC · SCHOLARLY
The biography is context.
The work is the evidence.
Approved short and extended biographies, press materials, query materials, manuscripts, screenplays, and project summaries are available for professional use.