New York Women in Film & Television (NYWIFT) and the Iris women filmmakers’ collective have announced the names of the talented group of screenwriters who will be participating in The Writers Lab program this year.
The Lab — which is funded by Academy Award-winner and outspoken champion of women in film Meryl Streep — is unique in that it is the only script development program in the world dedicated to women screenwriters over 40.
Last year’s inaugural Writers Lab received over 3,500 submissions. According to a press release, this year’s 12 successful applicants will travel to the Connecticut River Valley to take part in a program of “intensive one-on-one discussions” with the established women screenwriters who will act as their mentors, with whom they will “develop and refine their scripts.” These industry experts include Lisa Cortes (“Precious,” “Shadowboxer”), Caroline Kaplan (“Time Out of Mind,” “Me and You and Everyone We Know”), and Kirsten Smith (“Legally Blond,” “Ten Things I Hate About You”). There will also be “group panel discussions to explore universal themes and concepts.”
The 2016 cohort includes the likes of LGBTQ playwright Carol Carpenter (“Sweet, Sweet Spirit”) who has often explored familial and political upheaval along America’s urban-rural divide in her work for the stage. She is adapting her latest production, “The Guadalupe,” for the screen. The story is set on a Northrip-Valle family farm whose inhabitants find themselves caught up in a cartel territory war.
Melody Cooper, another playwright, is also part of the cohort. We recently featured Cooper’s film project, “The Sound of Darkness,” as one of our crowdfunding picks. The film is described as a supernatural thriller about “a blind Afro Cuban musician and a deaf black American sculptor” who are both “haunted by a woman only they can see and hear.” Cooper and the film’s creative team have partnered with The Black and Missing Foundation to bring awareness to the more than 64,000 missing black women and girls in the United States.
The full cohort list is reproduced below. The loglines for the screenwriters’ film projects are also available to read on the Writers Lab website.
The Writers Lab 2016
Carol Carpenter, “The Guadalupe”
Melody Cooper, “The Sound of Darkness”
Meredith DePaolo, “Devil’s Eye”
Nancy Duff, “Dead Drop”
Kate Erickson, “Roll With It”
Tina Field Howe, “Drone War”
Christina Hulen, “A Gentleman of Good Hope”
Christine Toy Johnson, “Jumping the Third Rail”
Nanci Katz-Ellis, “Blink”
Leslie Longworth, “One Bad Astronaut”
Barbara Nunberg, “Willful Blindness”
Stephanie Stanley, “The Radical”
