The Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay is the Academy Award for the best screenplay adapted from previously established material. The most frequently adapted media are novels, but other adapted narrative formats include stage plays, musicals, short stories, TV series, and even other films and film characters. All sequels are also considered adaptations by this standard.
James Francis Ivory is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter. For many years, he worked extensively with Indian-born film producer Ismail Merchant, his domestic as well as professional partner, and with screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. All three were principals in Merchant Ivory Productions, whose films have won seven Academy Awards; Ivory himself has been nominated for four Oscars, winning one.
David Magee is an American screenwriter who was nominated for a 2004 Academy Award and a Golden Globe for Finding Neverland. Along with Simon Beaufoy, he wrote the screenplay for Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day starring Frances McDormand and Amy Adams, which was released in 2008.
Nancy Oliver is an American playwright and screenwriter who is best known for her work on the successful TV series Six Feet Under. Oliver was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 2008 for her debut screenplay, Lars and the Real Girl.
Eric R. Roth is an American screenwriter. He has been nominated six times for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay — for Forrest Gump (1994), The Insider (1999), Munich (2005), The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), A Star Is Born (2018), and Dune (2021) — winning for Forrest Gump; he also earned a Best Picture nomination for producing Mank (2020). He also worked on the screenplays for the Oscar-nominated films Ali (2001) and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2011), as well as Martin Scorsese's epic Western crime drama Killers of the Flower Moon (2023).
Phyllis Nagy is an American theatre and film director, screenwriter and playwright. In 2006, Nagy was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for writing and directing Mrs. Harris (2005), her screen debut. In 2016, Nagy received an Academy Award nomination, among numerous other accolades, for Best Adapted Screenplay for the 2015 film Carol.
Mark Boal is an American journalist, screenwriter, and film producer. Boal initially worked as a journalist, writing for outlets like Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, Salon, and Playboy. Boal's 2004 article "Death and Dishonor" was adapted for the film In the Valley of Elah, which Boal also co-wrote.
John Gatins is an American screenwriter, director, and actor. For writing the drama film Flight (2012), he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
Theodore Melfi is an American filmmaker. His second film, St. Vincent starring Bill Murray, was released in 2014. In 2016, Melfi co-wrote, directed, and produced Hidden Figures with Allison Schroeder, for which he received Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. He is of Italian descent.
Anne Rosellini is an American film producer and screenwriter. She is best known for writing and producing the 2010 film Winter's Bone with her frequent collaborator Debra Granik. Her work has been nominated for numerous awards, including the Academy Award for Best Picture and for Best Adapted Screenplay. Before becoming a film producer, she was a programmer for various film festivals in Seattle, Washington.
Hidden Figures is a 2016 American biographical drama film directed by Theodore Melfi and written by Melfi and Allison Schroeder. It is loosely based on the 2016 non-fiction book of the same name by Margot Lee Shetterly about three female African-American mathematicians: Katherine Goble Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, who worked at NASA during the Space Race. Other stars include Kevin Costner, Kirsten Dunst, Jim Parsons, Mahershala Ali, Aldis Hodge, and Glen Powell.
Margot Lee Shetterly is an American nonfiction writer who has also worked in investment banking and media startups. Her first book, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race (2016), is about African-American women mathematicians working at NASA who were instrumental to the success of the United States space program. She sold the movie rights while still working on the book, and it was adapted as a feature film of the same name, Hidden Figures (2016). For several years Shetterly and her husband lived and worked in Mexico, where they founded and published Inside Mexico, a magazine directed to English-speaking readers.
Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race is a 2016 nonfiction book written by Margot Lee Shetterly. Shetterly started working on the book in 2010. The book takes place from the 1930s through the 1960s, depicting the particular barriers for Black women in science during this time, thereby providing a lesser-known history of NASA. The biographical text follows the lives of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, three mathematicians who worked as computers at NACA and NASA, during the space race. They overcame discrimination there, as women and as African Americans. Also featured is Christine Darden, who was the first African-American woman to be promoted into the Senior Executive Service for her work in researching supersonic flight and sonic booms.
Robert Mackenzie is an Australian supervising sound editor. He is best known for his work on Animal Kingdom (2010), The Hunter (2011), Lore (2012), Felony (2013), The Grandmaster (2013), The Rover (2014), Deadline Gallipoli (2015), Partisan (2015), Lion, and critically acclaimed war-drama film Hacksaw Ridge, for which he received two Academy Award nominations at the 89th Academy Awards, Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing (both shared with Andy Wright).
Jenno Topping is an American film producer. Films she has produced include Dr. Dolittle (1998), Charlie's Angels (2000), St. Vincent (2014), Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2016) and Hidden Figures (2016), which earned her an Academy Award for Best Picture nomination with Donna Gigliotti, Peter Chernin, Pharrell Williams, and Theodore Melfi, and again in 2020 at the 92nd Academy Awards for the 2019 film Ford v Ferrari, along with Chernin and James Mangold.
Matt Harris is an American screenwriter and television producer.
Patrick Burleigh is an American screenwriter, playwright, and essayist. He is best known as a screenwriter for Eternals, Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway, and Ant-Man and the Wasp. Burleigh grew up in New York City and Los Angeles before attending Dartmouth College and Trinity College Dublin. In 2015, he sold his screenplay adaptation of Nicholas Griffin’s book Ping-Pong Diplomacy: The Secret History Behind the Game That Changed the World to Village Roadshow Pictures.
