Mugs Cahill

• ISA Development Slate,
• ISA Top 25

I Growing up as the middle child in a large Irish Catholic family, Mugs is a born mediator who envisioned her life as either a covert operative or a preschool teacher. She settled on being an advertising creative director until she transitioned to a screenwriting career. Mugs has sold two feature screenplays, both now in pre-production, and has had another screenplay optioned. In addition to co...

Susan Turley

• ISA Development Slate,
• ISA Top 25

Susan is an award winning screenwriter and filmmaker. She has written and directed two features and several short films. Her feature directorial debut, THE MO of MI played in over 30 independent film festivals across the country and abroad before it was acquired and distributed by Ardustry Home entertainment. Her second feature film, CHANGING SPOTS was produced from her award-winning screenplay...

Jodi Elizabeth Levitan

• ISA Development Slate,
• ISA Top 25

Jodi Levitan began her writing career without words, first finding success writing mime and clown routines. Those routines grew into longer stories, and those stories grew into full length award-winning screenplays. Jodi s screenplays are character-driven stories with strong female leads that reach a multi-generational audience. All of her scripts are award winners in major screenplay contests,...

Diane Lansing

• ISA Development Slate,
• ISA Top 25

Chosen as one of ISA s Top 25 Writers To Watch in 2019, Diane remains busy working on her ninth screenplay. She has screened her directing work at the DGA, garnered awards and laurels including: an ATHE Award, Cinema At The Edge, L-Dub Film Festivals, Global Shorts, The Taiwan International Queer Film Festival and Cote d Azure Web Fest. As part of the Women In Film PSA program, Diane worked as ...

Zoe Warncke

• ISA Top 25

Born in Germany, Zoe grew up in a mentally, physically and sexually abusive home, Zoe escaped through books to graduate from law school. At university, she was introduced to dominatrix and found she liked the life-style so much, she continued and eventually became the internationally sought out dominatrix, Domina Hera, resulting in the co-authoring of her biography, Lawyer by Day/Dominatrix by ...

David Michael Kushner

• ISA Development Slate,
• ISA Top 25

David is an award-winning screenwriter whose love for cinema started at the age of five, when he would recruit his identical twin brother to help him reenact his favorite movie scenes for their parents. David s passion continued with theatre studies in high school, and he ultimately joined the Screen Actors Guild in 2009. After taking a creative writing course in college, David realized he want...

Ned Farr

• ISA Development Slate,
• ISA Top 25

Ned wrote and directed his third feature film, THE AERIALIST in 2018, and is looking forward to it's release in the fall of 2019. in 2019 Ned was named one of the ISA's Top 25 Writers to Watch. Ned's teleplay TIN KICKERS won the ISA Fellowship in the Spring of 2018. His horror screenplay HURRICANE PARTY was optioned by Alive Entertainment in 2019. Ned s screenplay COASTLINE finished in the top ...

Chris Courtney Martin

• ISA Development Slate,
• ISA Top 25

Chris Courtney Martin hails from Philadelphia, where they were cemented to their craft. As a pre-teen recruit of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth, they were granted scholarships three summers in a row to take accelerated courses in Creative Writing/Poetry, Logic and Film Studies (Whodunnit?). This illustrious program-- which boasts alumni such as Lady Gaga, Mark Zuckerberg...

Erica Tachoir

• ISA Development Slate,
• ISA Top 25

Erica Tachoir is a writer, director, and actor based in Brooklyn. Her screenplay SCATTERING JAKE was an Academy Nicholl Semifinalist, a Final Draft Big Break and PAGE Award Finalist, and a WeScreenplay and Table Read My Screenplay Austin winner. She was named to the 2018 Young & Hungry List, chosen for the ISA's Top 25 Screenwriters to Watch in 2019, and selected for NYWIFT's From Script to Pre...

Steven Prowse

• ISA Top 25

The ISA s Top 25 Screenwriter to Watch in 2019. Steven, an optioned screenwriter, was born in London and has lived in the Netherlands, Curaçao, USA, Gibraltar and is now back in London. In a past life he was a Cambridge scholar, a chartered accountant, a CFO and also an international bridge player. Since becoming a screenwriter five years ago, he has been official selected on over 200 occasions...

A. J. Bermudez

• ISA Development Slate,
• ISA Top 25

A. J. BERMUDEZ is an award-winning author and filmmaker based in Los Angeles and New York. Her first book, Stories No One Hopes Are About Them, won the 2022 Iowa Short Fiction Award and was a 2023 Lambda Award Finalist. Her most recent feature film project, My Dead Friend Zoe (co-written with director Kyle-Hausmann Stokes, starring Sonequa Martin-Green, Natalie Morales, Ed Harris, Morgan Freema...

S R Kui

• ISA Top 25

S R Kui studied medicine in California and trained in Texas. She came full circle to return to her first passion - writing. She is extremely grateful to The ISA team for selecting her as The ISA's Top 25 Screenwriter to Watch in 2019. She and her sister hope to share their mother's story with the rest of the world and to honor the 2-3 million lives lost during the Cambodian Genocide. They have ...

Josh Sorokach

• ISA Development Slate,
• ISA Top 25

Josh Sorokach is a writer living in New York City. In 2015, Josh teamed with Abominable Pictures to turn his New York Television Festival-winning script Semi-Charmed Life into a TV pilot starring Ryan Hansen and Noël Wells. In 2018, Josh's pilot Clean Slate was the Grand Prize Winner of The Table Read My Screenplay Competition, and in 2019, he was named one of the "Top 25 Screenwriters to Watch...

PERES OWINO

• ISA Development Slate,
• ISA Top 25

Peres Owino is a Daytime Emmy-nominated Kenyan storyteller who came onto the scene with her directorial debut, “BOUND: Africans vs African-Americans”, winning the Women In Film- Lena Sharpe Award at the Seattle International Film Festival and the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles. Her latest film projects, include the short films “Stray”, produc...

Julia Skikavich

• ISA Top 25

An award-winning screenwriter and journalist, Julia's writing is hailed for its women-centric and disability-lens approach in tackling intractable social issues. She is an alumnus of the Magee TV Diverse Screenwriters Mentorship program, ISA s Fast Track Fellowship, and the RespectAbility Entertainment Lab. Journalistically, she's covered elections, murder trials, plane crashes, the Olympics, a...

Annika Pampel

• ISA Development Slate,
• ISA Top 25

Annika was born and raised in former East - Germany. After her B.F.A. in Theater History and Directing at Bayreuth University in Germany, Annika received a Fulbright scholarship for Indiana University, Bloomington and then completed her education with a Masters in Film Directing at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia. She started working as part of the crew in various positions fr...

CJ Arellano

• ISA Top 25

C.J. is a media creator specializing in genre-driven, comedic, and human interest content. As a writer, C.J. was named one of the Top 25 Screenwriters to Watch by the International Screenwriters' Association. He has won grand prizes in the 43rd Asian-American International Film Festival's Screenplay Competition, the New York Screenplay Contest, and Columbia College Chicago's Written Image conte...

Chad Callaghan

• ISA Top 25

Callaghan studied playwriting at Yale under Donald Margulies, where he was the school s first gay sex-and-dating columnist (and yes, his mom read his column, and the ensuing conversations were just as awkward as you imagine). He received an MFA from the National Theater Conservatory and spent several years writing and performing all over the country. Callaghan won the ISA's Emerging Screenwrite...

Elaine Loh

• ISA Development Slate,
• ISA Top 25

Elaine Loh spent a decade as a working actor before crossing over to the other side of the camera and joining the writing staff of Gossip Girl for HBOMax, followed by Dynasty for the CW (also a Top Ten show worldwide on Netflix). Elaine is an HBO Writing Fellow and a Silver Prize winner of the prestigious PAGE Awards. She was featured on the coveted Young & Hungry List by the Tracking Board, an...

Peter Jang

• ISA Development Slate,
• ISA Top 25

I am a journeyman through the film industry with over 100 credits as an actor and stuntman since 2011. My production company Simplicity Pictures, Inc. was established in 2016 and has won awards internationally for films I wrote, directed, produced and starred in on minimal budgets. I look forward to shooting my first feature film shortly. Visit my website: HTTP://WWW.SIMPLICITY.PICTURES IMDB: H...

Jason Goldberg

• ISA Development Slate,
• ISA Top 25

Jason Scott Goldberg is an award-winning horror screenwriter/producer from New Jersey. He's landed on The Hit List, Young & Hungry List and Coverfly's Red List for his elevated genre stories. Jason wrote and produced "Stay Out of the Attic," which is available on Shudder and has worked on assignments for DC Comics (horror), MTV, Blumhouse and Top Dead Center Films. Jason is also a producer on "...

Ryan Shrime

• ISA Development Slate,
• ISA Top 25

Ryan P. Shrime's screenplay, PLEASE DON'T DIE, ROGER BERMAN, just won 3rd place out of 2000 submissions in the Emerging Screenwriters Feature competition.Ryan has been acting, writing, and producing since he graduated from Harvard University with an honors degree in Economics. Having made numerous appearances in film and television, he is a graduate of the three-year Meisner training program at...

Sean Collins-Smith

• ISA Development Slate,
• ISA Top 25

Sean Collins-Smith is a former midnight crime journalist and forever Bruce Springsteen-addict from Richmond, Virginia. Between covering homicides in the back of a news van at 2:30 a.m. and working 16-hour days, Sean began writing pilot scripts and entering screenplay contests. In 2017, he placed as a finalist in the Austin Film Festival's competition with his first pilot script, "End of Life". ...

Wendy Jean Wilkins

• ISA Development Slate,
• ISA Top 25

Wendy (Jean) Wilkins is an award-winning screenwriter, filmmaker and comedian and the one and only phone call you need to make from jail. Full of upstate New York pride, you can catch Wendy on stage every night in Los Angeles, California and all over the United States charming crowds with her all-too-truthful sass. In the daytime, she writes, directs, produces, and acts in a constant flow of fu...