The Black List And Women In Film Set 2023 Episodic Lab Writers
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EXCLUSIVE: The Black List and Women in Film said Monday that they have set the participants for their 2023 Episodic Lab, with seven television pilots from eight writers selected.
Now in its seventh year, the lab focuses on preparing women writers and writers of underrepresented genders for careers in writing for TV. More than 40 scribes have participated since its launch in 2016, with the organizations saying half currently have jobs in the industry.
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This year’s list features Bev Chukwu, Deanna Esposito, Eudie Pak, Laura Malatos & Helen Sun, Katherine Ruppe, Lorin Williams and Thea Rodgers.
The lab, supported by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and Shivhans Pictures, meets twice a week in March for sessions that include masterclasses, pitch workshops and lectures from guest mentors. This year’s mentors list includes Monica Beletsky (Parenthood), Jane Becker (Ted Lasso), Glen Mazzara (The Dark Tower), Sono Patel (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel) and Taylor Cox (Girls5Eva).
Participants will also meet with lab alumni mentors.
Here are the pilot loglines and bios of the 2023 lab class, per The Black List and WIF:
Bev Chukwu
NATION ONE – A collegiate swimmer with multiple sclerosis undergoes an experimental procedure to achieve her Olympic aspirations and becomes entangled with a mysterious utopian Black society that has conspiratorial ties to her father’s checkered past.
Chukwu is a Nigerian American writer, filmmaker, and script consultant. She is a former screenwriting fellow from the James A. Michener Center for Writers. As a producer, her short films have screened at Women in Horror Film Festival, Cine Las Americas, and AGLIFF. Her screenplay, PRINCE OF LAVENDALE STREET, was the feature winner in the 2021 BlueCat Screenplay Competition, and her video essay “Sometimes Black” is now used as educational material at the University of Texas at Austin. Mental health advocacy for people of the Black diaspora is at the forefront of her work.
Deanna Esposito
DISSENT – Toronto’s top legal aid lawyer by day and sex worker by night seeks to revolutionize the justice system for sexual assault victims. This proves nearly impossible when she comes up against her estranged mother, who defends accused rapists for a living.
Esposito received a Bachelor of Science from the University of Toronto, with a double major in Psychology and Criminology. During undergrad, she worked as a Courtroom Reporter at Toronto’s largest criminal courthouse. There, she discovered her love of storytelling and pivoted away from law school to obtain her MFA in Screenwriting at AFI (Class of ’22). Post-grad Deanna entered the industry as a Writer’s PA for Peacock’s upcoming series APPLES NEVER FALL. Deanna is passionate about telling stories that subvert the male gaze, and her favorite stories to write are the ones she wished she had growing up.
Eudie Pak
MEET THE PARKS – Meet the Parks is a dark-humored drama about three troubled Korean-American adoptees from the South who make a game out of murdering their adoptive family members and enemies who abused them during childhood. But can the adoptees carry out their mission without destroying each other first?
Pak was born and raised in an immigrant working-class family from the Bible Belt — and has the grit and love of grits to prove it. Her childhood was surrounded by doomsday religion and too many trips to Disney World, which has naturally inspired her to write about the macabre and taboo in highly imaginative ways, with an extra side helping of irreverence. Her projects have gone on to level at screenwriting competitions such as Final Draft Big Break, Screencraft, and WeScreenplay Diverse Voices. In 2022 she became a Circle of Confusion Writers Discovery Fellow and is currently repped by Circle of Confusion.
Helen Sun & Laura Malatos
CLOSING COSTS – An inexperienced real estate agent strikes big with the opportunity to sell a mansion in a bizarre Bavarian-style town, only to discover that it’s a stigmatized property where a gruesome murder took place.
Laura Malatos & Helen Sun are a writing-filmmaking duo with an appetite for overly ambitious characters and darkly comedic worlds. Despite being born 5,000 miles apart (in Seattle and literal Moscow, Russia), they came together at USC and have been ride-or-die roommates ever since. Alongside writing, they collaborate on social media ads, music videos, and narrative films – jobs that have brought them unhinged experiences, from transforming their apartment into an underground bunker to staging medieval fights in the California mountains. They are excited to keep exploring heightened worlds in their work and bring complex queer and female-driven narratives to the screen whilst having a laugh.
Katherine Ruppe
LIFTOFF – LIFTOFF intercuts the propulsive true story of America’s first female astronauts – six intrepid pioneers who blast through the chauvinistic brotherhood of spaceflight in 1978 – with the heartrending tale of the Challenger disaster, which claims the life of one of our first women and spurs Sally Ride to investigate, uncovering NASA secrets even as she keeps her own.
Ruppe grew up rodeo racing and exploring the wilds in Michigan’s rugged Upper Peninsula. A love of imagery inspired her early work in the International Cinematographers Guild, learning to convey story visually while advancing to camera operator on films and TV. Now Katherine writes about daring underdogs who go after the impossible, whether it’s rocketing to space or seeking justice. She’s developed an original crime drama with WBTV and her thriller feature TRUE NORTH is set to be produced by Resonate Entertainment. She’s a Humanitas New Voices Winner, Film Independent Episodic Lab Fellow, Fox Writers Incubator Finalist, and Sloan Foundation Grant Winner with LIFTOFF.
Lorin Williams
THE ANCESTORS -When a pragmatic FBI agent starts seeing her deceased relatives clear as day, she must figure out if this is a supernatural gift or a curse of her deteriorating mind, without losing footing in a very public and grisly case.
Williams is a television writer and producer living in the Los Angeles area. After graduating from film school, she moved to Los Angeles where she produced unscripted television for several years and joined the Producers Guild of America where she currently serves on the national board. In 2020, Lorin pivoted to scripted television and started working as a script coordinator on Transformers: Earthspark for Nickelodeon where she wrote her first episode of television for the series. Currently, Lorin is a freelance writer on the second season of the Rugrats reboot.
Thea Rodgers
THE BOOK OF BO – When a young medieval nun discovers a fundamental flaw in the Church’s logic, she sets out to rewrite the laws of what it means to be A Good Person-and sets off a revolution within the walls of her convent even as the Inquisition threatens its doors.
Rodgers is a Latine actor and writer who attended Emerson for a BS in neither. After starting her entertainment career at an award-winning trailer house and moonlighting as a producer’s assistant, Thea made the transition to the creative side, working in theaters around Los Angeles and Mexico and placing in script competitions such as Acclaim, the Page Awards, and the A-List. Most recently, she published a web novel with Tapas Media, was thrilled to write for the fourth season of the Emmy-winning interactive scripted show Artificial: Factions on Twitch, and was selected for the 2023 Mentorship Matters Writers Initiative. In her spare time you can find her talking about space at the Griffith Observatory.
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