2021 Native American TV Writers Lab

Jeremy Charles is a Writer/Director/Producer and Cherokee citizen from Oologah Oklahoma. Native representation in film is his mission, forming FireThief Productions in 2014. He  is a co-creator, director and producer for “Osiyo, Voices of the Cherokee People”, now in its seventh season, which has earned 9 regional Emmys, including an Emmy for Best Director in… Read more »

Liz Stephens is a Los Angeles-based enrolled member of the Choctaw tribe of Oklahoma. A performer in early versions of The Moth series, she’s now the author of memoir THE DAYS ARE GODS on University of Nebraska Press, and contributor to a number of anthologies. Her writing often examines themes of memory and identity, in… Read more »

Author and filmmaker, Brian Young is a graduate of both Yale University with a Bachelor’s in Film Studies and Columbia University with a Master’s in Creative Writing Fiction. An enrolled member of the Navajo Nation, he grew up on the Navajo Reservation but now currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.  As an undergraduate, Brian won a… Read more »

Andrina Smith is a storyteller, writer, and performer who graduated from Emerson College with a theatre degree in a pre-Hamilton world. She knew if she wanted to see stories like hers, she’d have to write them. Growing up Shinnecock in the Hamptons (where her tribe is located), her work frequently explores identity, race, and the experience of 1%-adjacent life. She trained… Read more »

Diego (Pascua Yaqui) is a screenwriter from Tucson, Arizona. He received his BA in Film and Media Studies from Dartmouth College in 2018. His Native Horror script, My-A-Knee, won the Laing Memorial Screenplay Award in 2016. His most recent television project, Casino Coyote, is a sixty minute family crime drama set on an Indian reservation near the Arizona/Mexico border. Diego is… Read more »

Glenís Hunter (Shinnecock) is a New York actress, writer and filmmaker based in LA. From a young age she discovered the performing arts as a way of self-expression. Growing up in the Dominican Republic and then moving back to New York in 2001, she got the opportunity to embrace her diverse multicultural (Black, Latinx and… Read more »

Alex Nystrom is an Ojibwe writer, director and producer from Minneapolis, Minnesota. After sound-mixing indie films, he moved to New Orleans to pursue filmmaking full-time. He worked his way up the camera department on films such as TRANSFORMERS: THE LAST KNIGHT, LOGAN, DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, 22 JUMP STREET, MIDNIGHT SPECIAL, OUR… Read more »

Shelby Ramirez is a Navajo (Diné) and Mexican American artist from the Navajo Nation (Dinétah.) She grew up in towns on the border of the reservation, and has a strong love for her land and people. She studied film with a focus on animation at Dartmouth College. Her final project was an animation which won… Read more »

JohnTom Knight is a proud member of the Cherokee Nation and was born at the Claremore Indian Hospital in Claremore, Oklahoma. More recently, he was selected as a fellow and participated in LA Skins Fest’s 2nd Annual Native American Animation Lab. Through this, he was able to meet and pitch an original series concept to… Read more »