By Jandiz Estrada Cardoso
I am overjoyed to share the eight screenwriting fellows selected to participate in Sundance Institute’s 2025 Episodic Intensive. In its third year, the annual program continues to introduce and expand our support for artists breaking into the scripted TV format with creative and professional guidance from a group of accomplished advisors. On April 10, we will gather virtually as a collective with fellows in Austin, Dublin, London, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, and New York City.
As part of the intensive, the fellows will be paired with either award-winning showrunners and writing producers for one-on-one feedback sessions on their script or development executives for feedback sessions on their pitch. The projects from the Episodic Intensive fellows represent a vast array of compelling genres and topics, from an animated dark comedy, a homecoming drama, and a mockumentary to stories peeking behind the curtain of K-pop, folklore, a university demonology department, an underground dating ring, and a buried murder that awakens a sleepy farming town. There will also be a half-day writers room led by a seasoned writer–executive producer where the cohort will collaboratively adapt an independent film that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival into a series.
The advisors participating in this year’s Episodic Intensive are Alissa Nutting (Teenage Euthanasia), Bruce Evans (25 Stories), Desta Tedros Reff (A League of Their Own), Javier Grillo-Marxauch (The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance), Jennifer Yale (Dexter), Kesila Childers (Monkeypaw’s No Drama), Michael Grassi (Brilliant Minds), Pia Chikiamco (Former Vice President of Comedy Development, HBO), Rae Sanni (A Black Lady Sketch Show), and Rochée Jeffrey (Grown-ish).
Fellows also receive Sundance Film Festival benefits; an invitation to join ELEVATE, the Institute’s innovative, year-round professional development track that empowers Sundance Institute–supported artists with essential business acumen to propel their projects forward and build a sustainable career. The track includes private workshops, connections with other Institute-supported artists, and a Community Package to Sundance Institute Collab, our digital artist platform where they can enroll in self-guided craft training curriculums. They are also invited to join concurrent online workshops hosted by our allied organizations, such as Humanitas Industry 101. To foster community building, participants were able to take part in Episodic Program alumni perks, such as invitations to in-person events in Los Angeles in March, including a private pre-release screening of Netflix and Shondaland’s The Residence and Dan Lin’s Rideback Rise Master Class and reception with Issa Rae.
The Sundance Institute Episodic Program is made possible by Founding Supporters Lyn and Norman Lear and Cindy Harrell Horn and Alan Horn. Leadership Supporters are the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, AMC+, NBCUniversal Launch, Netflix, and The Harry and Florence Sloan Foundation.
I want to extend a very special thanks to our Episodic Advisory Council members: Michelle Ashford, Daniel Chun, Nancy Cotton, Dante Di Loreto, Lee Eisenberg, Mike Flynn, Susannah Grant, Erica Rivinoja, Sarah Timberman, and Graham Yost.
EPISODIC INTENSIVE FELLOWS
The screenwriters are:
Jaclyn Backhaus with As Far As The Eye Can See: Yuba City, California. 1971. A growing Punjabi American farming community is forever changed when a body is found buried in a nearby orchard.
Jaclyn Backhaus is an award-winning, NYC-based Punjabi American playwright and screenwriter who writes expansively about family, history, and literature. Her plays have premiered off Broadway and across the country. Backhaus is an alum of the 2024 1497 Features Lab. She was raised by two botanists in the Sonoran Desert.
Aaron Baumann with The Darkness Inside Us: A documentary crew follows a misfit team of demonology researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison led by Dr. Edgar Gray, who himself is a 3-foot-tall, demon-possessed marionette puppet.
Aaron Baumann is a U.S. Air Force veteran from Milwaukee. He balances writing between his family and work at a law firm. Among other festival and competition accolades, his World War II drama A Taste of Eternity is a semifinalist for the 2025 Table Read My Screenplay Cannes competition.
Summer Benowitz with blob: An anthropomorphic blob attempts to turn itself back into a human — one minuscule, infuriating, frivolous, anxiety-provoking task at a time (a show about being in your 20s).
Raised in Philly and based in Los Angeles, Summer Benowitz is a writer, filmmaker, and magazine creator whose work centers on absurdist psychological dramas and social satire. Her stories have been featured via Film Shortage, Dances With Films, HollyWeb, Woods Hole Film Festival, Silver Lake Shorts, Cusper, and Currant Jam.
Liz Femi with Butter Baby: In this animated satire set in turbulent ’90s Nigeria, a group of 10-year-old misfits confront class, capitalism, oppression, and fourth grade.
Liz Femi is a Nigerian American writer and a 2024 Pushcart Prize winner in poetry. Her play Take Me to the Poorhouse is an NAACP Theatre Award nominee, and her work has been published in Michigan Quarterly Review, Good River Review, Wild Roof Journal, Stone Poetry Quarterly, and West Trade Review.
Patricia Kelly with Humdrum: A heartbroken court transcriber inappropriately interferes in the cases she types to try to find justice for victims, but quickly loses sight of what’s right and what’s very wrong.
Patricia Kelly’s debut feature, Verdigris, was nominated for five IFTA awards and has won 12 festival awards. Founder of MnáMná Films, she has two features in development with Screen Ireland and is a member of Ireland’s Writers Guild, Screen Directors Guild, Screen Producers Guild, and Women in Film and Television.
Liz Maynes-Aminzade with The Grapevine: In post-WWII Los Angeles, a brash young writer starts an underground lesbian dating service — but she must evade an ambitious policewoman on the L.A.P.D.’s brand-new vice squad.
Liz Maynes-Aminzade is a writer-editor currently overseeing the Puzzles & Games department at The New Yorker. She holds a Ph.D. in English literature from Harvard University, where she taught detective fiction and contemporary TV. She was named a Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow in recognition of her work in the public humanities.
Tom Richard Santos with John of Sherwood: After the death of Robin Hood, a grieving Little John returns to his ancestral Celtic tribe to protect it from the corrupt Church bent on stealing its land — and to confront the dark truth of his crimes as a Merry Man.
Tom Richard Santos is a Tejano writer, filmmaker, and sommelier based in Austin. In addition to work for indie films, TLC, and Richard Linklater’s Detour Filmproduction, he is developing Fronteras, a legal thriller centered on Mexican immigration, and prepping his directorial debut, And To All a Good Night, a Christmas dramedy.
Kulap Vilaysack with POP: A disgraced former K-pop idol from America and the fuck-up heir of a Red Bull–like energy drink empire form an unlikely partnership by starting an underdog K-pop record label.
Kulap Vilaysack is a comedic writer, director, actor, and podcaster. Vilaysack created, directed, and was the showrunner of Bajillion Dollar Propertie$. She also was the showrunner of NBC’s A Legendary Christmas with John and Chrissy. Vilaysack directed the documentary Origin Story, the Comedy Central special Ice Thickeners, and the short film Open & Shut.
