Indian born and raised, Archana is a graduate of Writers’ Access Support Staff Training Program ’23 and UCLA’s Professional Program in Screenwriting. Her feature and TV scripts have placed in Final Draft Big Break Competition, Austin Film Festival, and CineStory Feature and TV Contest. Her latest short, EARBUDS premiered at Tasveer - the world’s only Oscar-qualifying South Asian film festival.

Ashley Obinwanne is an LA-based writer and filmmaker who was born in New York and raised in Nigeria. She enjoys writing grounded, character-driven, dramas and dramedies about interconnected groups of people. Most recently, she served as the librettist, co-director, and producer on Better Off With You, a musical that had a sold-out performance at The 2024 Hollywood Fringe Festival.

Del Potter is an African American TV drama writer who was raised in a Paterson, NJ neighborhood with drug dealers and addicts who served as antagonists in his life. These antagonists also served as inspiration for Del’s introduction into storytelling.

After working in the NBA for a decade, Del went on to complete the UCLA TV Writer’s Program and regularly places in fellowships/contests.

Filipa Ioannou is a Cypriot American writer and stand-up comic. Before moving to LA, she worked as a journalist covering wildfires, murders and extremely petty crimes (think guy getting mugged for his laxatives) in the asbestos-filled newsrooms of various crumbling daily papers. After a mystery health scare left her briefly unable to walk, she was forced to get real about what she wanted from life, disappoint her immigrant father yet again and pursue her dream of writing for TV. She loves to write joke-dense comedy and atmospheric mystery and horror and in 2021, became an inaugural recipient of Cord Jefferson’s Susan M. Haas TV Writing Fellowship.

J. Gabriel Ware is a journalist and a TV news producer from Detroit. He worked at ABC News, where he field produced for Good Morning America and World News Tonight with David Muir. He covered the George Floyd protests, the Harvey Weinstein trial, and COVID-19.

Jazmyn Edmonds, one of seven siblings, grew up in a chaotic blend of Shameless meets Cheaper by the Dozen. She found solace in creativity, writing poetry and crafting stage plays. Embracing her inner Lydia Deetz, she nurtured a love for the unusual. A versatile storyteller, Jazmyn crafts supernatural thrillers and heartwarming dramas. Connect to bring her stories to life!

Growing up a misfit in small-town Illinois with a tough Mexican immigrant mom, Jon went to horror to make sense of his fears and insecurities. After serving as an Army MP and earning a BA in Creative Writing, he made for LA. Where he’s developed two pilots in the Veterans Writers Program, completed the WGF Support Staff Training Program, and served as Writers' Assistant on CBS's FBI: MOST WANTED.

Khadijah Iman is a Black Indigenous screenwriter from Boston, MA. She’s passionate about telling queer-led stories in the genre, procedural, and drama space - often exploring grief, identity, and social tensions. She’s a 2023 Writers’ Access Support Staff Training Program alum, a self-taught piano and drum player, and obsessed with Horror and classic Disney Channel Original Movies.

Kyle is an east-coast-based writer specializing in comedy that highlights flawed but well-meaning characters in absurd situations. In 2020, he was selected as a participant in the NBC Late Night Writer Workshop and in the 2022 Warner Bros Comedic Voices program.

Growing up as a queer woman in Iran, Maaman developed a dark sense of humor that fueled her film career. After being a political prisoner, she became a refugee in the US. With an MFA in film, she taught at the University of New Mexico before moving to LA. Her feature script was a Sundance finalist and a quarterfinalist at AFF and Slamdance. Her shorts have screened at Oscar-qualifying festivals.

Madonna Diaz-Refugia got her start writing jokes for drag queens in Philly and now lives in Los Angeles where they write about mental illness and being queer in the Filipinx-American community. She was part of the inaugural class of the Mentorship Matters Fellowship and studied at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in New York. Her work has also been featured on Reductress and WFMU.

Mai is a writer and queer first gen Vietnamese - American who aims to redefine the American Dream through stories that honor the complexity of queer, refugee, and AAPI communities. They have learned to embrace the chaos while working on sets of Dear White People, The Terminal List, and Killers of The Flower Moon. Currently, Mai is the assistant to LaToya Morgan at TinkerToy Productions.

Rodrigo Carvalhedo is a Brazilian, queer writer-director, passionate about magical realism. His pilot Enchanted Isle, based on his hometown myths, won the UCLA TV Comedy Award and garnered interest from studios. He created his award-winning short film Wishful Thinking as his real-life coming-out letter to share with his family. Carvalhedo aims to keep telling stories that build bridges of empathy.

Saira Umar is an Asian American writer who combines her multi-ethnic background with her interests like reading, musical theater, art and psychology. The stories she writes have themes of identity, culture, family, and following dreams, set in a hopeful world.

Currently, she's a PA at Titmouse. She's written for PBS Kids and was a semi-finalist for the Disney & Universal Animation Writing Programs.

Samuel C. Spitale is a storyteller, screenwriter, and author of the graphic novel How to Win the War on Truth. Growing up gay in the Deep South, he enjoys writing fish-out-of-water comedies that critique society, often through a lone voice of sanity in an insane world. He’s a former Development Manager for Star Wars collectibles, a Moth Story Slam winner, and a one-time puppet show performer.

Raised on teen soaps and hardcore music, Stephanie Leke is a first-generation Cameroonian-American writer and producer. She writes female-driven stories centering Black women existing in spaces they’re traditionally erased from. Currently in nonfiction, her recent credits include Mary J. Blige’s My Life (Amazon), Harry & Meghan (Netflix), and the Pharrell Williams Lego biopic, Piece by Piece.

Stephen Ra-Choi is a Korean-American writer who spent most of his childhood stuck behind a church pew, drawing comics or writing short stories that were highly inappropriate for a pastor’s kid. After writing a pilot inspired by his now 95-year old grandmother, Stephen was named winner of the 2023 ScreenCraft Screenwriting Fellowship and runner-up of the 2023 Script Pipeline TV Writing Contest.

Yeon Jin Lee is a Korean-American filmmaker. She's currently a showrunner’s assistant on the upcoming CBS series Watson and film STAR TREK: SECTION 31. After five years as a computer scientist at NASA, she left Silicon Valley to pursue filmmaking full-time. She is an alumna of the USC School of Cinematic Arts, The Black List Feature Lab, and Almanack Screenwriters.