ANNOUNCING OCTOBER FEATURE WRITERS

Here’s a beautiful thing in the middle of challenging times. Today we proudly announce the selected writers for our October feature writing program on Nantucket: Abby Ajayi, Donald Conley, and Sehaj Sethi . We support people with strong voices, people taking risks on the page and with their careers, people who know what to do with a full month of writing time, camaraderie, and focused mentorship on creative and professional fronts. Our selection process is never easy but it always results in an exceptional group of writers. We are particularly thrilled to see where this year’s group travels.

Abby Ajayi (MAKE IT VANISH) Abby graduated from Oxford University with a law degree and began her career working in script development at the BBC before turning to writing. After writing episodes on shows including: Eastenders and Hollyoaks in the UK, Abby was a Fulbright Scholar, studying screenwriting at the New York Film Academy. In the US, Abby’s credits include: How To Get Away with Murder (ABC/ Shondaland) and the TV adaptation of Four Weddings and a Funeral (Hulu/ MGM). Most recently, she was a Supervising Producer on the upcoming Inventing Anna (Netflix/ Shondaland). Abby is currently developing film and television projects in both the US and UK.

In Abby’s script, MAKE IT VANISH, a grieving mother travels back in time to rural England to track down her son's future murderer, and kill him before he kills her child. But when the killer she encounters is still a child himself, she realizes getting her hands bloody will be harder than she imagined. Can she do what it takes to save her boy?

Donald Conley (MARATHON) Donald was born & raised in Chicago. His Academy Award-qualifying short, SLEEP, premiered on HBO in 2013. Donald was the Associate Producer of Darius Clark Monroe’s feature length documentary, Evolution of a Criminal.  In 2018, Donald produced South Oxford, All Iowa Lawn Tennis Club, Maravilla, Serve, a series of four short documentaries based on articles published by Racquet Magazine.  Executive produced by Topic, South Oxford, AILTC, Maravilla, Serve premiered at the 2019 Whitney Museum Biennial.  He is currently in post production for a six-part political documentary series executive produced by ITVS.

MARATHON takes place in the aftermath of a brutal attack on Jontae, a meek teenage scholar misplaced at an alternative high school. As he weighs his response, he has to navigate disappointing his vengeful older brother or embarking on a perilous mission of retribution.

Sehaj Sethi (EVERYTHING IS FINE) Sehaj is an Indian American screenwriter and alumna from the New York University Graduate Film Program. She is currently partnering with I Can & I Will Productions on her TV series Bad Betis, produced by Gina Rodriguez. Sehaj is a staff writer on the CW show Two Sentence Horror Stories and previously worked as a staff writer at Luma Pictures, focusing on sci-fi feature projects. Early in her writing career, she created a horror feature for Paperclip Ltd. headed by Yeardley Smith. Sehaj has been awarded fellowships by the Anderson Center and the New Orleans Writers Residency. Her script The Third Rule was a finalist for the 2017 Athena List. Her script My Husband's Corpse placed on the 2012 Purple List, selected by industry judges as one of the best screenplays from New York University, and was an official selection at the Female Eye Film Festival. She is a member of New York Women in Film and Television, an organization supporting women in entertainment, and of Kalakars, a community promoting and supporting South Asian filmmakers. Sehaj is represented by Corrine Aquino at Artists First Management.

In EVERYTHING IS FINE, an Indian American woman returns home for Thanksgiving, and over the course of the holiday, links strange occurrences with her mother and sister to the mythology of Indian witches. As her family insists everything is fine, paranoia over long-hidden ancestral secrets and questions about her sanity consume her.

Finally, congratulations to our semi finalists whose work we know we will be seeing on the screen soon:

Aditia Mayya THIEF, Carla Simon SUMMER 1993, Chloe Sarbib HER TENDER EYES, Cristina Pippa GAMER GIRL, Dania Bdeir PIGEON WARS, Daniel Gallant THE WEATHER UPSETS HER, Daniella Bailes TWENTY-FOUR SEVEN JAPAN, Dina Fiasconaro DAYS IN THE WAKE, Donna Wheeler NATALIE RISING, Erin Kathleen THE WOMEN OF ROUTE 40, Hussein Hammouda 9/12, James Tyler CRUSHED AMBITION, Jeff Juhasz THE RUBIS, Joanna Arnow THE FEELING THAT THE TIME FOR DOING SOMETHING HAS PASSED, Julie Sharbutt RETREAT, Lara Jean Gallagher RED MOTHER, Maxwell Towson ONCE UPON A TIME IN SHAOLIN, Naomi Davis THE REVISIONIST, Nneka Samuel THE HOUSE WITH THE PURPLE DOOR, Rae Shaw MATING, Sarah Sellman GILLYFISH, Shari Berman PINK MIST