Announcing 2024 Episodic Lab Writers
We’re pleased to announce the selected writers for our 2024 Episodic Lab, which we are fortunate to host in Nosara, Costa Rica. Leading up to our first year, we questioned whether the tropical beauty and Pura Vida vibes would overwhelm our ability to do deep, focused work. Our concerns were quickly quelled. That year, and every year since, we’ve been impressed and inspired by how seriously our writers and mentors take the work. In Nantucket and Nosara we hope to provide writers with an environment that enables them to do their best work while surrounded by natural, meditative beauty. We’ll let you know how it goes, but from the look of these talented writers, we're definitely set up to succeed.
RAE BINSTOCK is a playwright and screenwriter from Cambridge, MA. Her work interrogates climate change and social justice through the drama of intersectional reckoning. She earned her B.A. from Columbia University. Her plays include That Heaven’s Vault Should Crack (The New Group, Lark Development Center, T. Schreiber’s Studios), POSER (The New Group, Thom Thomas Award finalist, Bay Area Playwrights Festival semifinalist), land of no mercy (Salt Lake Acting Company, Landing Theatre Company, Princess Grace finalist), WALKERS (The Shelter, O’Neill Conference semifinalist, Jerome Fellowship finalist), and Blue Skies (Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Festival). Her play Relentless is currently being developed off-Broadway by Sing Out, Louise! Productions.
Rae served as the Writers’ Assistant on both FX Networks’ FOSSE/VERDON and Apple TV+’s shows Schmigadoon, IF/THEN, and LIBERTY. She is also one of the authors of the Climate Storytelling Playbook, a writing guide for intersectional climate change stories published by the nonprofit Good Energy. Rae is the 2023 Grand Prize Winner of national TV pilot competitions from Creative Screenwriting, Screencraft, and WeScreenplay, and is a two-time semifinalist for the Sundance Episodic Lab. She has won fellowships with, among others, the Lark Play Development Center, the Dramatists Guild, NYSCA, and the Davey Foundation National Theatre Grant. She lives in Los Angeles with her cats, Lila and Garlic.
Project: BUTCH - A lesbian private detective takes on the filth, glamour, and corruption of 1970s New York as she investigates a series of murders targeting the city's newly radicalized gay community.
JON LAZAR is a Los Angeles-based Latino writer/director from NY. He was a Zamboni driver before obtaining his MFA in writing from Columbia University where he was a Faculty Selects Winner for both his TV Pilot and feature film script thesis’. He was a 2023 Circle of Confusion Discovery Fellow and a 2024 Sundance Episodic Intensive Fellow. In his spare time, he volunteers with the Freedom To Choose Project where he assists in the transformation of the lives of California DOC Inmates through compassionate experiential education with the aim to reduce prison violence and recidivism.
Jon is one of four siblings, a middle child surrounded by three sisters. His work tends to focus on character-driven crime dramas, thrillers, and mysteries with themes of mental illness and familial roots.
Project: NICER THINGS - A Dominican Nail Salon worker finds herself entrenched in the dangerous world of counterfeit goods to pay for her estranged father's supposed leukemia treatment.
CHRISTOPHER RADCLIFF is an award-winning mixed Chinese American filmmaker whose work has screened globally, including at the Sundance, SXSW, and Rotterdam film festivals, The Shed in New York City, The Swatch Art Peace Hotel in Shanghai, and online via Criterion, Lé Cinema Club, Short of the Week, and Vimeo Staff Picks. His first feature film THE STRANGE ONES was released theatrically in 2018, and was named by John Waters as one of the top ten films of the year. He is a member of the WGAE and the Motion Picture Editors Guild, and has received fellowships from Oxbelly and the WGAE/FilmNation. He received his MFA from Columbia University and currently teaches filmmaking at Pratt Institute in New York City.
Project: MY LONELY BOY - In the rust belt region of eastern Ohio, 30 year old factory worker Caleb leads a quiet and solitary life. When tragedy upends his routine existence, he is forced into uncharted territory as he begins to develop feelings for his co-worker’s volatile brother.
YANCEY WANG is a bi-lingual Chinese American film and television writer who grew up on 1990s Hong Kong cinema. She was most recently staffed on 20th TV/CBS’s TRUE LIES. She started her TV writing career through the Disney General Entertainment Writing Program. A graduate of AFI and former Production Executive at The Walt Disney Studios Motion Picture, she has production experience and resources all over the world, but especially in Asia. Her writing captures a grandiose ethos of epic fare while maintaining an authenticity for cultural representation. Her scripts and short films have won numerous screenwriting competitions, including AFI’s Writers Room Ready Award, the TV category of the ScreenCraft Action Adventure Competition and Grand Prize of the WeScreenplay Diverse Voice Competition. Her action-adventure pilot, South Sea, was ranked the No.1 script across genre and format on the Coverfly Red List in 2021.
Project: CIRCLE OF VICE - In Boston’s Chinatown, when a lowly immigrant is rejected by his former gang and loses the last shred of his dignity, he forms a plan to get rich on his own terms.
