Talent

Alexa Polivka grew up in a town so Anglo-Canadian, people there thought bagels were a foreign food. As the daughter of refugees who defected from communist Czechoslovakia, she was considered odd for eating things like paprikash. But when she showed up to school dressed as an elf even though it wasn't Halloween, her peers realized it wasn't the food; she was weird. She got bullied, and took up wifting to create powerless characters who find the strength to fight back. She became an advertising executive, creating award-winning campaigns for clients like Pepsi and Doritos, then left to get her MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. There, she won a Sloan award for screenwriting, as well as awards for her plays and TV scripts. She's written for various websites, including Funny or Die, and was an assistant to an Emmy-nominated writer on a show for Apple TV+.

Andrew N. Wong was born in the Bay Area but spent his formative years in a small river town in Illinois. Slow to adjust to a life of cornfields, country music, and good ol' Midwestern racism, he turned to writing and photography as a means of escape. After graduating from Webster University, he relocated to Los Angeles where he spent several years working both on set and as a Writers' PA.

His writing has placed or advanced in a variety of screenwriting competitions, including the Nicholl Fellowship, the PAGE International Screenwriting Competition, Final Draft's Big Break, and the Austin Film Festival. In 2019, his pilot The Mistakes of Our Fathers earned him a spot as a CAPE New Writers Fellow. When he isn't working, he can be found hiking, reading, drinking copious amounts of tea, or daydreaming of moving to London. Following the Workshop, Andrew was staffed on Superman & Lois (CW).

Anna Kerrigan's films and web series have premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, won awards at Outfest and the Tribeca Film Festival, and been nominated for a Gotham Award.

She has written and directed short films for Funny or Die, Amazon and Refinery 29, and is a Film Independent and Sundance Fellow. Indiewire recently featured Kerrigan as one of twenty exciting female filmmakers to watch, pointing to her new feature Cowboys starring Steve Zahn, Jillian Bell and Ann Dowd.

Born in Vietnam, Auden Bui is a DGA award-winning writer/director. She received her B.A. from UC Berkeley before pursuing her M.F.A. at USC's School of Cinematic Arts. Her graduate film The Lost City of Tomorrow was the recipient of many awards, including the DGA student award. An avid seeker of unfamiliar adventures, she has been to seven continents (Antarctica twice), and has a life goal of visiting every country before the age of 40.

As an Army brat who spent her elementary years living in Italy, home has always been a moving target for Erica Mountain. After an undergrad business degree at VCU, she was invited to L.A. to dance with Debbie Allen and then to dance in Step Up alongside Channing Tatum. While working towards an MFA Screenwriting degree at USC, Erica worked for Hunger Games writer Billy Ray, at Bad Robot and at the Fox Writer's Studio.

Since graduating, she has written & directed several short films and curated two film festivals. She has also worked as writers' support staff on Criminal Minds and Homeland and for Warner Bros., where she created extra content for the DC Comics shows. She is currently a Story Analyst at Universal and taking her latest film Polaroid to festivals.

Beyond her strides in writing, Erica is a travel junkie, dancer and foodie who is now making a home alongside her husband and adventure-seeking service dog.

John Bring was born and raised in a small town near the Georgia-Florida border. Growing up, he used his parents' Pawn Shop as his own personal production house, making homemade "blockbusters" with secondhand cameras and props. He channeled his obsession with comic books, theme parks, and R-rated movies into his own cheations, and after college, moved to Los Angeles with big dreams and zero prospects. Through tenacity and blind luck, he found himself working on an impressive array of single-season TV shows and unaired pilots. From there, John would work as the Writers' Assistant on the long-running CW drama, Supernatural, where he would go on to write two episodes. He was also a co-writer and artist of the comic book series, Penguins vs. Possums. If you're looking for him, Disneyland is a good place to start.

Kayla Westergard-Dobson was raised by hippie activist parents in the middle of conservative Orange County, California. She joined her first picket line in 1st grade and hasn't looked back since. After some rough years in her 20s, Kayla decided to tackle yet another hardship - trying to make it in Hollywood. She worked her way through every facet of the industry and rediscovered a dormant love for writing. Now able to channel her years of activism and experience into the kinds of stories she wants to tell, her work has appeared in the video game State of Decay 2, podcasts on the Parcast network, and on the 2017 Bitch List. She also currently produces two podcasts that deep dive into the peculiarities of human nature. When she's not writing thinly veiled metaphors of her high school bullies, she's rescuing kittens or curling (the Canadian sport, which is apparently somehow a thing in LA).

Lauren Bridges hails from suburban Philadelphia. After graduating from a majority white high school that unashamedly had a Native American as its mascot, she received her bachelor's degree from University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, where she played on the Women's Varsity Tennis Team. Afterwards, she moved to NYC, where she lived in a sixth-floor walk-up the size of your desk.

Tired of seeing rats everywhere, Lauren moved to LA. She worked as an assistant at CAA and then for a string of filmmakers, most recently showrunner Jenna Bans (Good Girls).

She also garnered over 15,000 views for her web series 'The Girls of Gamma Delta" and published a Thought Catalog essay "Modern Dating and the Logistics of Finding a Boyfriend." Following the Workshop, Lauren was staffed on Call Me Kat (Fox).

Leena Pendharkar is an award-winning writer and director. She premiered her sophomore feature film, 20 Weeks, at the Los Angeles Film Festival and it was released on Hulu and in theaters in 2018. Leena has also directed numerous short films, including the recent Awaken, starring Parminder Nagra, which is traveling the festival circuit. She is also currently in the CBS Diverse Directors program.

Marie Jamora is a writer-director born and raised in Manila, Philippines. Her film, Flip The Record, won the Grand Jury Award for Best Narrative Short at Urbanworld, and her first feature, What Isn't There, premiered at the Slamdance Film Festival. She is the director of both seasons of Family Style, an Asian foodie show with Warner Bros. After graduating from Columbia University with an MFA in Film, she returned to Manila to direct music videos, commercials, and television. Marie graduated from AFI's Directing Workshop for Women and the Warner Bros. Directors' Workshop and is part of the Lifetime Director Shadowing Program. She is Adjunct Directing Faculty at the American Film Institute.

Born on the Texas border, Melissa Hickey is a writer/director with a Masters in Directing from the AFI Conservatory. Her short film, Ni-Ni, premiered at Clermont Ferrand, won a DGA Diversity Award for Female Director, the Imagen Foundation Award for Best Short Film, and AFl's Richard P. Rodgers Spirit of Excellence award for independent filmmaking. She is an inaugural member of Ryan Murphy's Half Initiative, a fellow of the Sony Diverse Directors Program, an Academy Nicholl's Semifinalist, and a Sundance Screenwriters Intensive fellow.

Meredith Danluck began her career as an artist working in film and video. Her work has exhibited at festivals and institutions such as MoMA, PS1, Venice Biennale, TIFF, SXSW, Tribeca, and Sundance. She participated in the 2013 Sundance Screenwriters and Directors Labs for her first narrative feature, State Like Sleep, starring Michael Shannon and Katherine Waterston. She has worked on tour visuals for John Legend, Jay Z and Beyonce, and served as an Executive Producer and Director for Vice. She is currently developing her next narrative feature with the production company Sight Unseen.

A born-and-bred New Yorker, Michael Robin has been writing since 1995, when his short story "The Magic Balls" was rejected from Roaring Brook Elementary's literary magazine.

As a teenager, Michael navigated body dysmorphia by writing plays about confused Jewish virgins, and as an undergrad at Harvard, he won the Lee Patrick Award in Drama for his playwriting. Michael spent his post-college years in Teach for America, where he produced the first talent show at Wilbur Cross High School in a decade and once had to explain to his students why it's inappropriate to watch midget porn during English class.

Michael writes stories about outcasts who struggle to overcome internalized shame. He was a Humanitas New Voices finalist, and his scripts have been recognized by the Austin Film Festival and numerous other competitions. When not writing, you'll find Michael scallop hunting, board gaming, hosting Shabbat, or goofing off with his golden-doodle Biggie Lebowski.

A Bay Area native, Molly was raised by a single mom, so she never felt weird about tampons or being in charge. A lifetime theatre nerd, Molly trained as an actor at Bates College in Maine, studied abroad in London and Jamaica, and then hightailed it to New York. She spent over ten years teaching theatre to inner city kids and improv to incarcerated youth in Brooklyn and worked as an actor with Ars Nova, The O'Neill, CBS, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. After training at UCB, she wrote and starred in her web series Things I Hate, which went on to win Best Comedy at the NBCU Short Film Festival in 2016. She's written and starred in several viral sketch videos, written for NBC's Brands Partnerships, and her short film Avalanche, a miscarriage comedy with Lennon Parham and Vivian Bang, premiered at the Lower East Side Film Festival in June 2020. Following the Workshop, Molly was staffed on Pivoting (FOX).

Omer Ben-Shachar is a recent Student Academy Award-winning Israeli director based in Los Angeles, selected for Forbes Israel's 30 Under 30 list. His short film Tree #3 won UrbanWorld's Best Young Creator Award, Palm Springs ShortFest's Audience Award, and AFl's Richard P. Rogers Spirit of Excellence Award, among other accolades. An AFI Conservatory alum, Omer is currently part of the 2019-20 Viacom Viewfinder Emerging Directors Program and is a BAFTA LA Newcomers Program participant.

Solomon Onita's films have garnered global acclaim. He recently completed his debut feature film Tazmanian Devil, and also wrote and directed a short film, Joy, that deals with the complicated position of female genital mutilation around the world. Joy has screened at over 60 film festivals, was a finalist in the 2016 HBO Short Film Competition, and was subsequently distributed on all of HBO's platforms.

New Orleans native Stacey Muhammad was one of thirteen directors chosen by the DGA for their inaugural Commercial Director's Diversity Program. Her recent work includes directing episode 411 of Queen Sugar for OWN as well as commercials for The AD Council / AARP. She's currently working on her first feature film titled The Return and has been attached to direct a reimagining of the 1932 film White Zombie.

Tahir Jetter is an alum of the Sony Diverse Directors Program and has shadowed on The Goldbergs and Insecure. His feature film, How to Tell You're a Douchebag, and his short film, Close, both premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. He is currently also developing several projects for film and television.

Tiffanie Hsu is a writer/director whose work has played at Sundance, Cannes, HBO, and Netflix. She was selected as an HBO Visionary for her short film, Wonderland, and is developing the feature adaptation in both the Sundance and Film Independent Screenwriting Labs. She is an alumna of UCLA's School of Theater, Film, and Television, AFl's Directing Workshop for Women and Sony's Diverse Directors Program. She grew up in Wisconsin, Taiwan, and Southern California, and got her start directing stop-motion animation and location-specific Shakespeare.

Yoko Okumura most recently directed and co-storied the Ball of Twine episodes of the Sam Raimi horror anthology 50 States of Fright on Quibi, starring Ming-Na Wen (Agents of Shield) and Karen Allen (Raiders of the Lost Ark). She is an alum of the Ryan Murphy Half Initiative, The Fox Directing Program and WIF/Sundance Financing Intensive. Yoko graduated from both the Cal Arts school of Film/Video and the AFI Directing Program.