Bay Area-born Aaron Ruttenberg is a TV comedy/drama writer and Cal State LA film grad. His scripts have placed in the ScreenCraft Comedy Competition, and his short doc, Bound, won Best Short Documentary at a local Los Angeles festival. A former floater at Legendary, Aaron now works as a copywriter. He’s also a tarot reader, aspiring scuba diver, and trivia champ.

Alley Turner is a Black writer from Newark, NJ who enjoys writing dramedies and dramas about dream chasers who defy expectations. She has worked as a production assistant on feature films and at music festivals in Atlanta and NYC. Prior to TV/film, she worked on Ebola response and prevention at CDC. Based in Los Angeles, she enjoys long walks at the grocery store, especially the sauce aisle.

Asia “A.R.” Gamble is a Black female drama/dramedy writer, born and raised in Los Angeles (yes, how rare). After earning her BA in theater with a focus on acting, Asia went on to work as an Executive Assistant in development and management, studied TV writing with Sundance Collab, and recently graduated from the 2025 Writers Guild Foundation's Writers’ Access Support Staff Training Program.

Chloe Samillano is a Manila-born, Riverside-raised queer writer (and occasional filmmaker) with a background in social impact work. Their stories explore inequality, power, and hope within systems and relationships. She has received fellowships from ARRAY, BAVC Media, and Lambda Literary, and was mentored by Samantha Militante (Reservation Dogs) through Unlock Her Potential.

Colin Rothamel is a comedy writer, ’90s lover, and unofficial pop music historian. Growing up gay in Bible-thumping Texas, he abandoned studying Jesus to worship more significant figures in history: the Spice Girls. Now based in LA, Colin has worked on productions for CBS, Netflix, and The CW, and will produce his dark comedy web series this spring.

A queer, multi-racial writer/performer, Jess Kim uses satire and dark comedy to question humanity’s obsession with maintaining social status in a world beyond our control. Whales could flip a yacht at any time! She won the 2022 SNL Award at The Groundlings, has written and performed in many a sketch comedy show, and accidentally organized Los Angeles rock climbing gyms into a union.

Kayla Yumi Lewis is a Korean-American writer from Silicon Valley with a BFA from NYU. Her debut YA pilot, PARKED IN AMERICA, premiered at SXSW '21 in the episodic category and won the Pitch-a-thon. PARKED screened at 8 more festivals including SeriesFest, where she won the Best Writer (Drama) Award and the Level Forward Impact Award. She currently works in development at Uzo Aduba's Meynon Media.

Manda K. Skelton is a veteran and TV drama/fanfic writer who knew that no matter what she did in her life, there would always be magic. Whether it was growing up in small-town Texas and sneaking banned Harry Potter books into her local library or joining the Navy as a firefighter to help pay for her MFA in Screenwriting at USC, she writes about characters trying to find their place in the world.

Rio Contrada is a writer, director and nihilistic flower child from Northampton, Massachusetts. A queer Italian Jew and community organizer, his work explores intersectionality in a dramedic, surrealist tone. His debut feature, starring Debbie Allen, is set to premiere at Dances with Films this June. His writing has placed in Austin Film Festival, Screencraft and the Black List’s Top Pilots List.

Rubén Mendive is a queer Mexican immigrant and comedy writer who grew up undocumented on Chicago’s South Side. He’s an alum of the WGF Writers' Access Support Staff Training Program, the NHMC Series Scriptwriters Program, and Lena Waithe’s Hillman Grad Mentorship Lab. He also hosts La Lista: A Latinx Writers Podcast, an interview series spotlighting diverse voices in media.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Anpa'o Locke is an Afro-Indigenous writer, filmmaker and curator who is Húŋkpapȟa Lakota and Ahtna Dené (Village of Tazlina), born in the Standing Rock Nation. She currently resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She was a 2023 Native Lab Sundance Institute Fellow and 2022 Full Circle Sundance Institute Fellow. She received her degree in Film Studies from Mount Holyoke College.

Christian Mejía is a Mexican-American writer who tells intimate working-class stories about chasing the American dream as if it was a scrappy dog that stays slipping through the fence. Perpetually a step behind, his protagonists slog through the muddy bogs of class mobility in their journeys to reach the ivory tower, only to discover they lost the keys along the way.

Diarra McCormick is a screenwriter and playwright who expresses her pain in a comedic and dramatic way, which is showcased in her original TV pilot, Homebound, based on Hurricane Katrina. Her full-length stage play called, Black People Problems, is based on the notion that black people are still mentally enslaved. McCormick is an Air Force veteran and has an M.F.A. in Screenwriting from LMU.