Posts by: Joyce Hills

Meet the New NYWIFT Member: Katie Shannon

Welcome to NYWIFT, Katie Shannon! Katie Shannon is a producer and casting professional based in Brooklyn, with a storied background in marketing and brand management. She now works in administration at Weiden+Kennedy while bringing her creativity and organizational skills to various New York-based film and theater productions. Katie will be producing the US circuit of a one-woman show at The Brick on October 8th with London talent, Temi Wilkey. Notably, Temi’s European show, Lover Girl, recently got accepted into the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and the SoHo Theatre in London.

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Meet the New NYWIFT Member: Sophia Baldassari

Let’s welcome screenwriter, script supervisor, and playwright Sophia Baldassari to NYWIFT! She was most recently an Associate Producer on the Radio Silence thriller LOSER, directed by Colleen McGuinness. Her plays and pilots have been developed/produced at Luna Stage, George Street Playhouse, the McCarter Theatre Center, Haddonfield Plays and Players, and Manhattan Repertory Theatre, and have received accolades from the O’Neill Center Young Playwrights, Theatremania Young Playwrights, Beardance International Playwriting Festival, the Neil LaBute New Theatre Festival, the Austin Film Festival, among others. She’s studied Writing at Sarah Lawrence and Egyptology at the University of Oxford, an experience she used to write a buddy comedy about the mummy of a Pharaoh’s 29th Favorite wife. She is a member of the Writers Guild of America East, The New York Script Supervisors Network, and IATSE Local 111. In our interview, we discussed uniting accessible and female driven stories with comedy and surrealism, the structural switches between playwriting and screenwriting, and the unexpected comedy of life in ancient Egypt. Let’s dive in!

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Meet the New NYWIFT Member: Ashley Bacon

Welcome to NYWIFT, Ashley Bacon! Ashley is an actor and producer in New York. She leads the 80s thriller Something of a Monster which was released in December on AppleTV, and her claim to fame is a recurring arc on Orange is the New Black. She was nominated for Best Actor at Cindependent for her work in The Flip Side (2023). Upcoming projects include leading the film A Matchmaker’s Christmas, a star-studded community fundraiser of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and raising her small child. She lives in Brooklyn with - in her words - "two cats, one daughter, and one husband." We welcome actor and producer Ashley Bacon to NYWIFT! In her New Member Spotlight, we discussed the famous RDJ scene that inspired Ashley to become an actor, the community garden motivating her next project, and her favorite film she’s worked on so far.

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