Waldo Miller Salt was an American screenwriter who won Academy Awards for both Midnight Cowboy and Coming Home.
John August is an American screenwriter, director, producer, and novelist. He is known for writing the films Go (1999), Charlie's Angels (2000), Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle (2003), Big Fish (2003), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), Frankenweenie (2012), the Disney live-action adaptation of Aladdin (2019) and the novel Arlo Finch in the Valley of Fire (2018).
Maryam Keshavarz is an American-Iranian filmmaker best known for her 2011 film Circumstance distributed by Participant Media and Roadside Attractions, which won the Audience Award at Sundance Film Festival.
Lisa Cholodenko is an American screenwriter and director. Cholodenko wrote and directed the films High Art (1998), Laurel Canyon (2002), and The Kids Are All Right (2010). She has also directed television, including the miniseries Olive Kitteridge (2014) and Unbelievable (2019). She primarily directs New Queer Cinema style films and television, with large themes surrounding feminism and the LGBTQIA+ community.
Julia Kwan is a Canadian screenwriter, director, and occasional producer of her own short and feature films. She has brought a keen sense of the Chinese-Canadian cultural experience to her films. Several of the films were made in conjunction with the National Film Board of Canada Her feature films include Eve and the Fire Horse (2005), as well as the feature length Documentary film Everything Will Be (2014). She is also known for her short film 10,000 Delusions (1999) which screened at the Vancouver International Film Festival.
Ava Marie DuVernay is an American filmmaker. She won the directing award in the U.S. dramatic competition at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival for her second feature film Middle of Nowhere, becoming the first black woman to win the award. For her work on Selma (2014), DuVernay became the first black woman to be nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Director, and also the first black female director to have her film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. In 2017, she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for her film 13th (2016).
Fuel is a 2008 documentary film directed by Josh Tickell and produced by Greg Reitman, Dale Rosenbloom, Daniel Assael, Darius Fisher, and Rebecca Harrell Tickell.
Marielle Stiles Heller is an American writer, director, and actress. She is best known for directing The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015), Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018), and the Fred Rogers drama film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019).
James Adam Ponsoldt is an American film director, actor and screenwriter. He directed the drama films Off the Black (2006) and Smashed (2012), the romantic comedy-drama The Spectacular Now (2013), and the dramas The End of the Tour (2015) and The Circle (2017).
The Bechdel test, also known as the Bechdel–Wallace test, is a measure of the representation of women in fiction. It asks whether a work features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. The requirement that the two women must be named is sometimes added.
Howard A. Rodman is a screenwriter, author and educator. He is the former President of the Writers Guild of America, West, professor and former chair of the writing division at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, alumni of Telluride Association Summer Program and an artistic director of the Sundance Institute Screenwriting Labs.
Mark Axelrod is a professor of Comparative Literature at Chapman University’s Wilkinson College of Humanities and Social Sciences. For sixteen years he has been the Director of the John Fowles Center for Creative Writing which has received five National Endowment for the Arts Grants.
Queen of Katwe is a 2016 American biographical drama feature film directed by Mira Nair and written by William Wheeler. Starring David Oyelowo, Lupita Nyong'o, and Madina Nalwanga, the film depicts the life of Phiona Mutesi, a girl living in Katwe, a slum of Kampala, the capital of Uganda. She learns to play chess and becomes a Woman Candidate Master after her victories at World Chess Olympiads.
Tom Stempel is an American film scholar and critic. He is a Professor Emeritus in Film at Los Angeles City College, where he taught from 1971 to 2011.
Hilary Brougher is a screenwriter and director living and working in N.Y.C. She says that the reason she is inspired to make films is that " [she] was interested in the connection that happens among audience members via a shared screen, and the collaboration that happens in making films. That was three decades ago. [She] is still interested." She wrote and directed her first feature, The Sticky Fingers of Time in 1996. She wrote and directed her second feature, Stephanie Daley in 2006. The film starred Tilda Swinton, Amber Tamblyn, Melissa Leo, Tim Hutton and Denis O’Hare. In 2006, the film won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the Sundance Film Festival and Brougher won Best Director at the Milan International Film Festival, while actress Amber Tamblyn won Best Actress from The Locarno International Film Festival in 2006. The film was bought by Lifetime Television and the title changed to What She Knew. In 2014 Brougher was credited as co-writer with Tristine Skyler and director of an adaptation of Jane Mendelsohn’s novel, Innocence. In 2017, Brougher wrote and directed an original film, South Mountain which premiered at SXSW 2019 in the Narrative Features Competition. The film was highly regarded by critics including The Hollywood Reporter, Variety and Indiewire. In an interview with Filmmaker Magazine, Brougher discussed her micro-budget experience, "This was the smallest budget I've worked with and yet it felt the most ample."
The International Screenwriters' Association is a screenwriting resource and community founded by filmmaker Craig James Pietrowiak. Craig James is an award winning writer, director and producer grew up on the north side of Chicago and graduated from Northern Illinois University. After his TV pilot "Wrigleyville" was noticed by a major Hollywood agency, which lead to literary representation, Pietrowiak moved to Los Angeles where he chose to stay. After some time in LA, finding difficulty in uncovering helpful resources to develop the craft, he started the ISA in 2008 to make it easier for screenwriters to find the tools necessary to connect to the industry and launch their career. Pietrowiak's recent focus has been on the expansion of the ISA and growth of its international membership, as well as his filmmaking and acting career.
Misan Sagay is a British-Nigerian screenwriter, best known for the 2013 film Belle.
Angela Rye is an American attorney and the Principal and CEO of IMPACT Strategies, a political advocacy firm in Washington, DC. She is a liberal political commentator on CNN and an NPR political analyst.
Derek Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American filmmaker and playwright best known for his 2016 feature film The Housemaid , which was shot in Vietnam and produced by CJ E&M Film Division, HKFilm, and Timothy Linh Bui.
Little Monsters is a 2019 zombie comedy film written and directed by Abe Forsythe, starring Lupita Nyong'o, Alexander England, Kat Stewart, Diesel La Torraca and Josh Gad. The story centres on a washed-up musician, a children's television personality, and a kindergarten teacher teaming up to protect a group of young schoolchildren during a sudden zombie outbreak.
