NYWIFT Blog

By Mariana Valencia

Welcome to NYWIFT, Shervonne Brown!

Shervonne Brown is a New York-based award-winning actress, writer-director, producer, and science-fiction creator working across science fiction, fantasy, action, and psychological drama.

She wrote, directed, produced, edited, and starred in Sureiya: The Eidolon Plane, earning Best Actress at the 2026 WSO Theatre & Film Festival. Her pilot screenplay, Sureiya: Legends of Emperion, was a 2026 finalist in the London International Screenwriting Competition.

Before filmmaking, Brown built an international K-pop performance career, co-founded performance groups, created award-winning music videos, appeared on television, and performed across the United States and South Korea, including the K-Pop World Festival broadcast internationally on KBS television. 

In our interview, Shervonne discusses her creative inspirations, artistic upbringing, and the multiple genres that motivate her work. 

New NYWIFT Member Shervonne Brown

Could you give our readers a brief introduction to yourself?

I’m Shervonne Brown, a New York-based award-winning actress, writer-director, producer, editor, and science-fiction creator working across film and television. My creative home is science fiction, fantasy, action, and psychological drama—particularly stories that place complex women at the center of worlds and mythologies from which they have too often been excluded. 

My career began in performance and expanded into full-scale visual storytelling. Before focusing on narrative film, I co-founded K-pop performance groups, created and produced award-winning music videos, appeared on television through my K-pop work, and performed across the United States and South Korea. I represented the United States at the K-Pop World Festival in Changwon, where my performance aired internationally on KBS. That experience taught me how concept, music, movement, image, editing, and audience work together.

I brought that interdisciplinary approach into filmmaking when I wrote, directed, produced, edited, and starred in Sureiya: The Eidolon Plane, earning Best Actress at the 2026 WSO Theatre & Film Festival. The film became the live-action proof of concept for The Sureiya Hayes Universe.

Shervonne Brown as Sureiya Hayes

What brought you to NYWIFT?

I joined NYWIFT because I had reached a point where I no longer wanted to treat doing everything alone as the highest form of strength.

Making an independent film showed me how much I could build through discipline and resourcefulness, but it also made me honest about how much further the work can travel when supported by the right community. I wanted to be around women who understand not only the creative side of filmmaking but also the relationships, business knowledge, and long-term strategy required to sustain a career.

I’m interested in building genuine relationships with actors, writers, directors, producers, editors, executives, and crew members who care about ambitious stories led by women. I also hope to contribute what I have learned from carrying projects through development, production, performance, post-production, branding, and festival strategy. 

NYWIFT feels like a place where I can continue growing while becoming more deeply connected to New York’s film and television community.

Shervonne on set

What aspects of your life and background have motivated you to pursue filmmaking?

Performance came before filmmaking for me. I trained in classical voice and theater, performed in musicals, created music videos, and spent years building a career around K-pop performance. Co-founding groups and producing visual projects required me to develop concepts, lead collaborators, rehearse, perform, edit, and bring the finished work to an audience. It taught me that storytelling begins long before the camera turns on.

At the same time, I grew up deeply drawn to science fiction, fantasy, anime, action, and mythology. As a Black girl, I often loved worlds that did not seem to imagine someone like me at their center. More broadly, I noticed how often women were flattened into single dimensions: strong but not vulnerable, romantic but not dangerous, brilliant but not messy.

I wanted women who could contain all of those contradictions. Eventually, I stopped waiting for those characters and worlds to appear and began building them myself.

Shervonne as Sureiya Hayes.

What characteristics of performing and filmmaking shape the genre of stories you want to tell?

Acting is the entry point into everything I write. No matter how large the world becomes, I need to understand what the character wants in that moment, what she is hiding, and what she fears will happen if she tells the truth.

I love action, mystery, romance, and cosmic scale, but I am most interested in the internal shift that occurs before a woman makes an irreversible choice. In Sureiya: Legends of Emperion, Sureiya’s grief, attraction, sensory overwhelm, and need for control can trigger volatile Emperion Fragments that distort perception and behavior. Her emotional life therefore has concrete consequences for the people and systems around her.

Music makes me think in rhythm, sound, and atmosphere. Performance training keeps me attentive to silence, breath, and power shifts. Combat training makes me consider what physical choices reveal about a character instead of treating action as decoration. As a director and producer, I want even the largest worlds to remain grounded in intimate, character-driven choices. 

NYWIFT Member Shervonne Brown accepting award.

What is the most fulfilling aspect of your journey in filmmaking?

The most fulfilling part is watching something that once existed only inside my mind become real enough for other people to enter.

While making Sureiya: The Eidolon Plane, I moved constantly between acting, writing, directing, producing, and editing. It was demanding, but it proved that the universe was no longer only an idea. Other performers could inhabit it, and audiences could respond to it.

Receiving the Best Actress award meant a great deal because I created the film partly to prove that I could carry the kind of formidable, emotionally complicated genre lead I had spent years searching for. The deeper fulfillment comes from seeing a woman who might once have been treated as a supporting character become the hero, the mystery, the love story, and the center of an entire mythology.

Shervonne on set

What is the biggest lesson you’ve learned so far in your career?

The biggest lesson has been that ambition only becomes useful when people can enter it.

I naturally see the entire world of a story at once: its history, relationships, politics, visual language, future seasons, and every possible expansion. Earlier in my development process, that instinct sometimes made me lead with the size of the universe before giving people a clear emotional doorway into it.

I have learned to begin with the woman, the wound, and the immediate stakes. I have also learned not to wait until every resource is perfect before allowing the work to exist. Sureiya: The Eidolon Plane was not the final expression of everything I want the universe to become, but completing it gave me a film, an acting award, festival recognition, stronger material, and a clearer understanding of my voice.

A completed step can create more movement than years spent protecting an idea from judgment. The vision does not have to become smaller. It has to become clear enough for someone else to feel why it matters.

Shervonne’s work being screened

What project(s) are you currently working on that our readers should be on the lookout for?

My primary project is Sureiya: Legends of Emperion, a one-hour serialized science-fiction drama and the flagship series in The Sureiya Hayes Universe. It follows Sureiya Hayes, the last known survivor of a destroyed matriarchal world, who is forced to work for a government that fears her while searching for the truth behind the catastrophe she believes she may have caused.

With parts of her memory missing, Sureiya is sent on missions involving volatile Emperion Fragments—artifacts that can alter perception, influence behavior, and become dangerous weapons in the wrong hands. Each mission brings her closer to understanding what happened to her world, why she survived, and what her connection to Emperion truly means. At the same time, her growing bond with Veronica Ryn, the operative sent to retrieve her, begins to unravel the emotional control Sureiya has relied on to survive and draws both women toward truths they were never meant to uncover. 

What excites me most is the kind of world the series has the potential to become: an expansive, women-led science-fiction universe anchored by a central sapphic romance, where women are allowed to be mythic, romantic, dangerous, funny, vulnerable, flawed, and central to the fate of everything around them. 

I completed the live-action proof-of-concept short film Sureiya: The Eidolon Plane, and the pilot screenplay for Sureiya: Legends of Emperion was named a finalist by the London International Screenwriting Competition in 2026. I am continuing to refine the pilot, season architecture, and larger television development package. The next stage is expanding the world with creative and producing collaborators who are excited by ambitious genre storytelling, emotionally complex women, serialized mystery, action, and love stories with real narrative consequence.  

Connect with Shervonne Brown on Instagram at @shervonnebrown and on her website www.shervonnebrown.com. And learn more about The Sureiya Hayes Universe on Instagram at @sureiyauniverse

(All images courtesy of Shervonne Brown)