WRITING PROJECTS:
DIGITAL SERIES:
BEST THING YOU’LL EVER DO
SYNOPSIS:
Just when thirty-seven-year-old Mae Maurai's Silicon Valley start-up is poised to skyrocket, she learns her uterus is poised to closed up shop. Mae is utterly undecided about whether or not to have a baby, but her fiancée wants nothing more than to have a biological family of his own. Does she seek the success she’s always desired or have a baby - which many people say is the "best thing you’ll ever do."
HONORS:
Official Selection, Raindance Film Festival 2017
Winner, Best Short Drama Series, Independent Television Festival 2017
Winner, Audience Choice Award, Seattle Web Festival 2017
Silver Winner, Screenwriting, Washington DC Web Festival 2017
Finalist, Best International Drama, Melbourne Web Festival 2017
Winner, Emerging Voices Award, Brooklyn Web Festival 2016
STARRING:
BHAVESH PATEL: Gold, LATE BLOOMERS, THE GOOD WIFE, JON GLASER LOVES GEAR
MYRA LUCRETIA TAYLOR: The Big Sick, ATLANTA, GIRLS
MICHELLE ANG: FEAR THE WALKING DEAD (Emmy Nomination)
Available to stream on Vimeo & Amazon
PLAYS:
NINA / VIOLETTA
NINA/VIOLETTA (a two-hander with music from Verdi’s Traviata) is a dark fairytale about Nina, a mother who feels forced to choose between her passions: raising her children and her once-promising career as an opera singer. Ten years after leaving the stage, Nina's ultimate comeback appears: singing Violetta in La Traviata at The Met. But the role of her lifetime arrives with some slippery, peculiar consequences. Will Nina risk it all to taste the success her soul desires or will she stay at home and risk swallowing her regret?
Pre-production for workshop in Chicago 2024
SCREENPLAYS:
HEARTLAND
(feature film | drama)
LOG-LINE:
When a cash-poor Midwestern house cleaner learns her wanted pregnancy is high-risk, she takes a leap of faith and joins a Coding Bootcamp to try and make ends meet. As she begins to excel at her new career in STEM, her traditional identity shifts, putting her at painful odds with her family and faith community.
SYNOPSIS:
West Allis, Wisconsin 2013: Still reeling from the Great Recession, a massive auto-parts factory closes and thousands of good-paying jobs fall like dominoes as the polar vortex sets in. KATIE, a quintessential Midwesterner is blissfully pregnant even in the face of her hard-working husband TYLER losing his factory job. Then Silicon Valley entrepreneur ANYA blazes into town with an idea she hopes can save West Allis: her Coding Bootcamp. But for all her good intentions, Anya insults Katie and the people of West Allis to their core. Both Katie and Tyler’s worlds come crashing down when they learn their baby has a terrible genetic disorder. Facing rock-bottom finances Katie seeks out Anya’s Coding Bootcamp. As Katie learns about coding -- what it is, how it works, and what it can do -- she begins to see computer science as a way to solve her problems. Katie starts to see new possibilities for her life and feels empowered to follow her convictions, but in doing so she finds herself at deep odds with her tight-knit family. And when Anya offers to help Katie find a job in Silicon Valley -- with benefits that would help her baby–- Katie faces her biggest fears. Will she stay in Wisconsin surrounded by everything she knows or go to California and risk losing every one she loves?
ANCHOR POINT
(feature film | thriller)
LOG-LINE:
A passionate scientist on a hellbent mission to save a tiny coastal town from a destructive algae bloom is forced to battle her own demons when she becomes haunted by a spirit in the depths of the Pacific Ocean.
SHORT PITCH:
Imagine a passionate scientist on a mission to save a tiny Northwestern Pacific fishing village from a raging algae bloom. Only the locals don’t want her help because they’re running a fishing scam that’s poisoning the water and making them rich -- so they try to scare her off with their local legend about the ghost of a hideous midwife who murdered mothers in labor and trapped their souls in the little white shells that line their shores. And though the scientist knows it must be fiction, their story awakens her own demons about her mother’s death in childbirth.
My screenplay is called ANCHOR POINT and it tells the story of a brilliant environmentalist whose hellbent mission to save the water in a tiny coastal town forces her to face the trauma of her mother's death when she’s visited by a spirit in the Pacific Ocean. It all builds to a furious battle between the scientist and the tentacled ghost amidst a sea of dead fish. After gouging out the phantom’s eye with her sample knife, the scientist surrenders to her fate in its tentacled arms. But when the ghost delivers the scientist into the bosom of her beloved mother, the sun rises, the water clears and life begins to form again on the shell-lined shores of ANCHOR POINT.
FEEL:
The Birds meets The Shape of Water
HONORS:
Chosen for the Stowe Story Labs Sidewalk Narrative Lab in 2021.
NOVELS:
MEAT
MEAT (The spark of a new novel loosely based on somewhat true events) Imagine an upstart vegan influencer who crashes the New York City celebrity chef clique through the reach of social media, but just as the NY Times’ food critic calls her plant-based restaurant “the gem in NYC’s fine-dining crown” she makes an appalling social media gaffe and is cancelled from the entire food world. The story is called MEAT and it follows a fame-obsessed vegan chef who loses her status and then maybe her mind when embezzles $200k from her own restaurant and steals a rescue shelter greyhound to ride shotgun with her through America’s Heartland. It all builds to the moment she’s arrested in a roadside motel after using a credit card to order a Domino’s pepperoni pizza.
[WORK IN PROGRESS]
AQUATIC SCIENCE NOVEL
HUMORIST SHORT STORY COLLECTION
[WORK IN PROGRESS]