After graduating from NYU’s Graduate Film Program, John co-wrote and directed Kill Your Darlings, a film about the birth of the Beat movement starring Daniel Radcliffe, Elizabeth Olsen, Dane DeHaan and Ben Foster. Revolving around a sexually-charged murder mystery at Columbia University in 1944, Krokidas’s combination of a darkly poetic period style together with a boldly contemporary feel—a soundtrack that includes Brooklyn art-rock band TV on the Radio—got the film accepted into the Sundance, Venice and Toronto Film Festivals and garnered outstanding reviews. “Its vision of the past is stereoscopic… It gives its audience a taste of that terror, and also of the thrill and intoxication that went along with it,” said the New York Times. Rolling Stone called it “a dark beauty of a film that gets inside your head and stays there.” It won Best International Film at the Venice Days section of the Venice Film Festival and was on several Best Films of 2013 Lists including The New York Times, the Hollywood Reporter and NPR.

While still at college, John was chosen by The Advocate as one of their “Top 40 Under 40,” and had great success with two short films he wrote and directed. The first, Shame No More, played at over 70 film festivals and aired on PBS, IFC and the Sundance Channel and the second, Slo-Mo, premiered at the Telluride Film Festival and went on to play Sundance before traveling the world and becoming a finalist for the2003 Academy Awards. Slo-Mo was later bought and aired on HBO. John was also signed to a three-picture writing deal at Miramax on graduation, and also has wrote screenplays for Universal Studios, Fox 2000, and Renee Zellweger, among others. He also directed a well-received PSA for Hilary Clinton staring Jack Nicholson, and more recently a couple of episodes of the ABC drama Black Box.