In any movie or TV show, the screenwriters dream up the worlds we see on our screens, long before they turn into an image. They are foundational to every scene, character interaction, and plot twist. This is why we are once again partnering with the Austin Film Festival (AFF) to spotlight promising new voices in screenwriting.
As the festival prepares for its 30th year, it remains a unique celebration of the vital role screenwriters play in the film and television industry. Our 2023 list of Screenwriters to Watch promises to be full of writers that you’ll be hearing from more in the future.
Meet the Austin Film Festival Screenwriters to Watch
Alex Simon
Who:
Alex is a screenwriter and film journalist, USC and AFI graduate, and writer of Baron of Havana, Nobody Said Goodbye, and The Damocles Sword.
A favorite screenwriter:
Paul Attanasio.
The biggest lessons you have learned:
Nobody knows anything. Don’t go into the arts unless you feel you have no choice. Always take the money. Idealists tend to die broke.
Also Read: AIR Screenwriter Alex Convery on the Moment We Realize Sonny Vaccaro (and Michael Jordan’s) Genius
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Zane Borg
Who:
Zane Borg is a young filmmaker out of Melbourne, Australia, whose debut feature film, The Library Boys, which he wrote at 19, won the Comedy Vanguard Award at the 2022 AFF.
A favorite screenwriter:
Noah Baumbach.
The hardest scene or project you’ve ever had to write in your career:
The ones that my heart was never truly in, and the only solution is to refocus my energy on projects that are personal and excite me.
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Zack Ford
Who:
Zack is a writer/producer who splits his time between LA, NY, and Key West. He’s an NYU alum.
A favorite screenwriter:
Me. Your favorite screenwriter has to be you. Otherwise, your writing won’t improve because you’ll be constantly hung up on comparison and you’ll never tell the stories only you can tell.
Some of your favorite films:
Amadeus, hands down. And, the original Nightmare on Elm Street, which I saw a special screening of at AFF in the late 90’s, hosted by Wes Craven himself.
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Stevie Wain
Who:
Stevie grew up in a very small conservative town with one freshly out of the gay closet mom and one divorced bitter dad. Her latest produced TV pilot, Day Jobs, won the 2022 Audience Award at AFF.
A favorite screenwriter:
Hands down, Samantha Strauss and Joey Soloway.
A memorable experience sparked from Austin Film Festival:
Talking on the episodic storytelling panel at AFF was a great moment. And it made me feel like… “Oh wow, this is what I’m supposed to be doing. Like, gushing about writing is where I belong.”
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Nick Richey
Who:
Nick’s writing/directing debut, Low Low is now streaming on Paramount+. His sophomore screenwriting and directing effort, 1-800-HOT-NITE was a marquee film selection at AFF. He is now in pre-production on his third feature film, BITS, BODY AND BONES. (You can read our interview with Nick Richey about 1-800-HOT-NITE here.)
A favorite screenwriter:
Issa Rae is a major inspiration for me in television.
A major turning point in your career:
When I got my first network series pitch. I was brutally unprepared and had zero experience pitching a show. I realized at that moment that I’m in a room, essentially asking a company to invest millions of dollars in a kernel of an idea.
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Janene Lin
Who:
Janene grew up in San Francisco with her big family of Chinese immigrants. She launched a 13-year career in advertising telling other people’s stories before realizing she wanted to tell her own. She’s currently writing for Frasier.
A favorite film:
Everything Everywhere All At Once.
How has being part of the AFF Community helped spark your storytelling journey:
AFF is like Comic-Con for writers. It’s a nurturing and inspiring space to nerd out with fellow scribes. There’s always something for me to learn from others, no matter where I am in my writing career.
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Brett & Drew Pierce
Who:
The Pierce Brothers’ horror film The Wretched opened in drive-in theaters in 2020 by IFC Midnight and was the #1 movie in the United States for six consecutive weekends, making it the first film to hold that record since the release of Avatar in 2009.
A favorite screenwriter:
Lawrence Kasdan.
A memorable experience sparked from Austin Film Festival:
Sitting in a tiny room with Lawrence Kasdan and a few others listening to him talk about writing Raiders of the Lost Ark and realizing the writing experience is just as difficult even for a film you perceive as perfect.
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Grace (Ge) Gao
Who:
Grace moved to California from China with her family at 16, then escaped the suburbs to pursue her dream as a writer/director at NYU Tisch. In addition to placing as a finalist at AFF, Grace’s bilingual feature script Old Maiden’s Prayer is also a Humanitas New Voices Fellowship 2022 semi-finalist.
A favorite screenwriter:
Diablo Cody.
The biggest lessons you have learned:
Don’t sprint a marathon. A writer’s career goes on for a lifetime. Each small step I take matters, and each failure that occurs will help me grow.
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Saeed Crumpler
Who:
Saeed most recently signed a development deal with Sony Pictures Television, and he’s been staffed on Showtime’s Flatbush Midemeanors. He strives to bring stories from the subculture into the mainstream.
A favorite screenwriter:
Quentin Tarantino and Aaron Sorkin.
A major turning point in your career:
The major turning point in my career was my “not giving a f*uck”. Once I stopped caring about the results and feedback and just consistently put myself out there without being worried about the outcome – things started happening for me.
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Ana Maria Defillo
Who:
Ana is a Caracas-born, Miami-raised, Dominican writer. Before her TV career, she paved her road to hell as a Christian missionary, human rights grad student and nonprofit professional. Now she spreads her gospel of cynicism as a comedy writer.
A favorite screenwriter:
Nathan Fielder.
The hardest scene or project you’ve ever had to write in your career:
Momentous, the script that won at AFF, got me repped, and best exemplifies my voice. It went through so many versions and revisions over the years. Once I cracked it I experienced a cliché I thought was bullshit, it poured out of me.
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Déjà Cresencia Bernhardt
Who:
Déjà draws upon her mixed AAPI lineage, finding inspiration to tell both narrative and documentary stories. Déjà’s feature screenplay, Last Hawaiian Sugar, was named one of the top ten unproduced screenplays by Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment and The Black List.
A favorite screenwriter:
Annie Silverstein, Brayden Yoder and Zoe Eisenberg.
How did you get your start in screenwriting:
It was only later, in graduate school, that I found myself in screenwriting classes after spending years focusing on my documentary work. So, most of what I first wrote about, and still do, is based on my own life, those closest to me or informed by my doc experiences.
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Matt Foss
Who:
Matt is an Autistic writer who started his career in animal ecology before transitioning to making theater, and then film, full time. This past year he was a semi-finalist in the AMC One-Hour Pilot and Comedy Teleplay categories at AFF and a top five finalist in the Final Draft Big Break contest.
A favorite screenwriter:
The communities where I get to work and write about and for.
The hardest scene or project you’ve ever had to write in your career:
I teach screenwriting and theater classes in a high security prison. An incarcerated student asked me “why I was hiding” in class and it shook me up pretty bad. I think that has been the largest reckoning, but also this really timely gift.
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Aisha Evelyna
Who:
Born to Canadian parents of Caribbean descent, Aisha is passionate about bringing stories of the underrepresented to the forefront of our social consciousness. She is an actor, writer, and director, based in Toronto.
A favorite screenwriter:
Michaela Coel and Phoebe Waller Bridge.
A major turning point in your career:
I wrote and starred in my second short film “Shoegazer.” After the response to that film, I really started to own that I was a writer. I wasn’t just an actor who thought it would be cute to try writing.
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Hussain Pirani
Who:
Born in Karachi and raised in Austin, Hussain is a storyteller with over a decade of experience crafting narrative shorts, docs, and commercials. Hussain, drawing from his immigrant experience, writes dramas steeped in genre that explore themes of family, identity, and human resilience.
A favorite screenwriter:
Marti Noxon
A memorable experience sparked from Austin Film Festival:
It might be the time Meg LeFauve bought a round of drinks as we celebrated the Writers Guild card I just received. She had only met me moments ago… but it’s a testament to her generosity and the spirit of the festival where we celebrate one another’s wins in this wild industry.
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Ralph Parker III & Will Henderson III
Who:
Ralph Parker III and Will Henderson III are two Black writers/directors from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. After collaborating together on their award-winning short film “Sammy, Without Strings,” the two continue developing creative projects.
A favorite screenwriter:
Ralph: Ingmar Bergman.
Will: Michaela Coel and Jordan Peele.
The biggest lessons you have learned:
Will: it sounds cliche, but “timing” isn’t worth driving yourself crazy over. Things will happen when they need to happen as long as you keep moving. That’s the key thing for me: never becoming stagnant.
Ralph: when you can understand and fully realize your characters, the possibilities of the story and world of the film are almost limitless.
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Raul Sharma
Who:
Raul is an emerging Kiwi-Indian screenwriter with extensive development and production experience. His screenplays have garnered international recognition, from receiving the New Zealand Writers Guild’s coveted Seed Grant to placing in the Academy Nicholl Fellowships and AFF, among others.
A favorite screenwriter:
My favorite screenplay is probably Deeper, an unproduced script by Max Landis.
A major turning point in your career:
Quitting my day job as a content writer and focusing solely on screenwriting, which put me in survival mode and forced me to hustle, expand my network, and build my portfolio.
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Lillie Gardner
Who:
Born and raised in Minnesota, Lillie studied music and writing at NYU. Lillie writes about women defying expectations. Her animated kids series, Allegra Sparkle’s Guide to the Great Composers (You Might Not Have Heard Of) won at AFF.
A favorite screenwriter:
Ava DuVernay.
How did you get your start in screenwriting:
As a pianist, I became passionate about advocating for women composers—specifically Amy Beach, who was the first really successful female composer in America. I kept thinking, “Someone should write a movie about her!”
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Aaron Strongoni & Andrew McAllister
Who:
Andrew: After Andy directed The Pioneertown Palace (SXSW Grand Jury Nominee), he directed the documentary series Sketchbook for Disney+ and also worked on Marvel’s 616, A Spark Story, More Than Robots, and the upcoming Stan Lee for Disney+.
Aaron: After writing commercials, promos and trailers for Disney, Aaron sold the feature script Madhouse to Lakeshore Entertainment. He then wrote two of the popular Return Of The Living Dead sequels. Other credits include Furnace, Linsanity, and Fast Five.
A favorite screenwriter:
Edgar Wright.
The hardest scene or project you’ve ever had to write in your career:
Our next one. We just get too excited about too many ideas. The next script usually feels right if it feels a little out of reach, a little weirder but the core concept is fun enough to sustain a year of criticism, doubt and debates.
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Hannah Stoddard & Jenny Ulmer
Who:
Hannah and Jenny are a comedy writing duo based in Los Angeles known for their unique art backgrounds, adult horse girl personas, and most importantly – their love of unexpected female stories.
A favorite screenwriter:
Phoebe Waller Bridge.
How have you been spending your time since being a part of Austin Film Festival:
We’ve managed to move from being “aspiring writers” to quitting our day jobs and concentrating solely on our writing pursuits. We were most recently staffed on Steve Levitan’s Hulu series Reboot.
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Christina K. Moore
Who:
Christina is a diverse screenwriter with a background in acting and post production. She most recently wrote and co-produced for the Nickelodeon show Are You Afraid of the Dark.
A favorite screenwriter:
Adam McKay.
The hardest scene or project you’ve ever had to write in your career:
The ones where I know everything’s going to change based on production realities. But those experiences actually helped me realize what makes a good scene – it’s about character stakes.
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Kim Marcelino
Who:
Kim is a Chinese- and Filipino-American writer, director, and award-winning playwright who writes lighthearted comedies about serious subjects centering on flawed women of color.
A favorite screenwriter:
Sharon Horgan.
A major turning point in your career:
The moment I committed to realizing my work rather than waiting for others to produce it is when things really changed for me.
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Chinwe Okorie
Who:
Chinwe is a multi-genre writer and director who crafts stories rooted in reality and elevated by witty and absurdist observation. Her dark comedy Elephant! premiered at AFF in 2022.
A favorite screenwriter:
Paul Thomas Anderson.
A memorable experience sparked from Austin Film Festival:
One year I had drinks with David Kajganich after attending his panel on story structure. We kept in touch after the festival and so a few years later, I was excited to tell him that I finally got a film into AFF!
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Hanadi Elyan
Who:
Hanadi is a Jordanian-Palestinian filmmaker based in Boston whose film Salma’s Home won AFF 2022 Best Feature Film Audience Award. She is an assistant professor of narrative film directing at Emerson College.
A favorite film:
Three Colours: White.
The biggest lessons you have learned:
That’s it’s better to have a bad script than no script at all. We all have to start somewhere and I cannot fix it if it’s not written down.
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Isaac Garza
Who:
Isaac is an Austin-based filmmaker whose short film, “Chemistry,” won the Best Latinx Short Film award at the Cleveland International Film Festival and played in competition at the AFF.
A favorite screenwriter:
The Sadfie Brothers.
The hardest scene or project you’ve ever had to write in your career:
I dramatized a real scene that happened between my father and me. I had to learn to let go of any judgment towards the characters and allow myself to write for what makes the story as a whole work.
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Miranda Nation
Who:
Miranda is an award-winning filmmaker with a strong interest in social justice and a desire to create complex contemporary roles for women. Her acclaimed debut feature Undertow was in theaters in early 2020.
A favorite screenwriter:
Celine Sciamma.
The biggest lessons you have learned:
Stay true to your vision. Keep a sense of humor. And just keep writing every day.
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