The Black List & WIF Set 2024 Episodic Lab Participants

Armando Tinoco
·6 min read
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EXCLUSIVE: The Black List and WIF have announced the participants of the 2024 Episodic Lab, which focuses on preparing women writers and writers of underrepresented genders for a career in television writing.

“Coming out of an incredibly challenging year for our industry, the Black List and WIF are dedicated to ensuring talented writers of all genders still have the opportunities they need to be discovered, supported, and most importantly hired in the world of television,” said Megan Halpern, Senior Vice President at the Black List.

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Maikiko James, Senior Program Director at WIF, added, “We’re thrilled about this year’s class of Episodic writers and the stories they have to share and we’re excited for them to join the rich community we’ve cultivated over the last eight years of this Lab.”

Mentors for this year include Glen Mazzara (The Dark Towter), Liz Hannah (The Girl From Plainville), Andy Siara (The Resort), Krista Vernoff (Grey’s Anatomy), and Monica Owusu-Breen (Percy Jackson and the Olympians).

Nearly 50 writers have gone through the Episodic Lab since its inception in 2016, and more than half of the Lab alumni are currently staffed and working in television.

Submissions for the 2025 Episodic Lab are also open today.

Meet the 2024 Episodic Lab Participants:

Aisha Amin

South Bay: In a rural Texas town, two teenagers commit suicide after being hypnotized by their high school principal. Their ambitious classmate, Caro decides to take up her own investigation into the incident that slowly begins to divide her small town.

Aisha Amin is a NYC-based writer and director of Pakistani and Kenyan descent whose practice spans narrative and documentary forms. Her award-winning short films have been screened at festivals around the world. Aisha is interested in telling stories from the perspectives of young women who are the heroes of their own journeys. She is a 2023 Cine Qua Non-Screenwriting Lab fellow and received the NYFA Women’s Fund in 2022. She received The Shed’s Open Call Fellowship, during which she expanded into installation art. Aisha received an MFA in Screenwriting at Columbia University in 2024.

Brooke Solomon

Bronze Bullets: In tomorrow’s American Southwest, a trio of orphaned sisters make their living as mercenaries for a menacing employer, all while dodging vicious dust storms, acid rainfall, and a pair of determined lawmen on their tail.

Brooke Solomon grew up as a bisexual Lebanese girl on a farm in rural New Hampshire, where animals generally outnumbered – and outranked – the local people. She graduated from Emerson College and promptly went to work in the world of film development. Brooke has a special love for splashy action pieces, world-building, and anything mythology-inspired. Her work has placed in the Austin Film Festival Script Competition, Final Draft’s Big Break, Moonshot’s Pilot Accelerator, and the SeriesFest National Women Writing Competition. Brooke also co-hosts The Queer Quadrant, a podcast focused on LGBTQ+ representation (or lack thereof) in blockbusters. She is currently developing an original series with The Lab, and is repped by Gramercy Park Entertainment.

Cassidy MJ Lee

THE INNOMINATE –

The Innominate: Sent to recover from white torture in her birth country, a CIA operative begins to reluctantly question her own adoption. Her search for answers pits her against a madcap assassin to whom her past and present is inextricably linked – and turns her into a pawn between her home and birth countries.

Imported from Korea as a baby to the cornfields of the Midwest, Cassidy MJ Lee is a writer because she was good at English and bad at science. Thrillers, action, and seditious dynamics are her wheelhouse, so she’s always hoped to end up on a blacklist. Lee is also a development executive, passionate about growing underrepresented stories and creatives. Currently, at Le Train Train Productions, she cut her teeth in Production and International TV at Propagate Content. She has been a fellow in the Athena Film Festival and Lifetime Feature Lab and was awarded by the Austin Film Festival.

Julia Doolittle

Nemesis: Grad school rivals turned novelists tell conflicting narratives of the crime they both committed, but for which only one of them went to jail. A not-so-true-crime symphony of rivalry, conspiracy, and unreliable narrators.

Julia Doolittle is a Los Angeles based screenwriter and playwright. (Plays are the ones where you can’t eat in the middle.) Her work on stage has been seen at New York Stage and Film, SecondStage, Ensemble Studio Theatre, South Coast Repertory, Williamstown and more.

Julia was born in Reseda, CA, and survived seven years of Catholic School before attending Sarah Lawrence College, rated by the Princeton Review as “the exact opposite of Catholic School in every way”. Post-graduation, she moved to New York City to pursue a career in playwriting and, more recently, has relocated to Los Angeles for film and television. She is currently developing a feature with a major production company. REPS: Paradigm and Brillstein.

Natalie Wood

Killer Queen: A woman’s life is turned upside down when her husband is arrested on the suspicion that he is a serial killer.

Natalie Wood is a queer half-Mexican dramedy writer committed to reimagining coming-of-age stories. Born and raised in a Texas border town, Natalie uses writing to explore themes of identity, self-discovery, and second chances. Natalie got her start in entertainment as an NBC Page, and she worked as a Development Coordinator at Ben Stiller’s production company, Red Hour Films, before transitioning to support staff roles on shows like Severance and Chicago Fire. Natalie’s script Killer Queen won the 2022 Final Draft Big Break TV grand prize, and she was a participant in the 2023 National Hispanic Media Coalition’s Series Scriptwriters Program.

Reilly Ryan Marquez

Sparkle Baby: After a fun and mostly unsupervised summer vacation in Vegas, nine-year-old Cece is thrilled to head home to her real life. But when her mom and grandma decide they’re all staying indefinitely, Cece struggles to adjust to her new normal.

Reilly Ryan Marquez is a Mexican-American dramedy writer who grew up always “the new kid,” attending twelve schools by the time she graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in counterterrorism and journalism. When she failed to become a reporter, Reilly pivoted and enjoyed a career in music supervision. In 2020, eager to write again, she landed a job on The Goldbergs, and has been working her way up as an assistant in comedy rooms ever since. In her writing, Reilly uses magical realism to tell female-driven stories that explore love, silver linings, and what it means to be family.

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