Bio – Lab 2023 Virtual

RespectAbility Entertainment Professionals Lab, Summer 2023

Makena Metz

Makena Metz is an LA native who writes fantasy, sci-fi, and magical realism for the page, screen, and stage. She has an MFA in Creative Writing and MA in English from Chapman University’s dual degree program and was the winner of the 2023 James L. Doti Outstanding Graduate Student Award. Makena is a proud member of DGA, ASCAP, WIA, and the SCL. Recently, her short screenplay Eclipse was published with For Page and Screen Magazine, Issue 3, and she participated in #AWP23’s Writer to Agent Program. In 2022, Makena’s short script Grow was published with The Clockhouse Review Literary Magazine for Volume 9, her short story The Tea Shop was published with For Page and Screen Magazine Issue 2, and her monologue Reflection was published with WE:US Monologues for Gender Minority Characters Anthology. Additionally, her animated (half-hour) pilot Theo’s Grand Adventure placed #13 on The Red List on Coverfly. Last year, Makena’s song “Race Against Time” (co-written with Angela Parrish and Dan Povenmire) premiered in Episode 2: “Math Punch!” of Hamster & Gretel on Disney Channel. Makena was chosen as a mentee through MAESTRA music and also as an emerging artist NEXT Literary Fellow for The Braid Theatre Company. Makena is an alum of the Musical Theatre Writer’s Collective Program and New Musical Inc’s CORE Curriculum for Musical Theatre Writing. Find her work on Coverfly, NPX, and follow her @ makenametz on Tiktok, IG, FB, Twitter, and check out www.makenametz.com.

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RespectAbility Entertainment Professionals Lab, Summer 2023

Nancy Pickett

Nancy Pickett is a disabled filmmaker with a focus on documentary and nonfiction content. She independently produced her first feature-length film, a documentary about pediatric cancer, in high school. The Golden Truth is available for streaming on Amazon Prime. Her short films, which cover a range of topics from human trafficking to arts education, have been recognized by film festivals across the country and the News and Documentary Emmy Awards, where she received the prestigious Mike Wallace Memorial Scholarship for her coverage of US healthcare reform in Is Healthcare a Human Right? which used her personal experience with chronic illness to explain the Affordable Care Act.

Thanks to generous support from the National Association of LGBTQ Journalists Facebook Journalism Scholarship, AAPD/NBCUniversal Tony Coelho Media Scholarship, and others, Nancy graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in telecommunication from the University of Florida Online. She is now pursuing her master’s degree in Public Interest Communication, where she is learning strategies to ensure that her films go beyond raising awareness to create tangible social change. Her next project, a docu-series about disparities in healthcare, will include a curriculum for medical students to learn about implicit bias and a resource hub to help patients navigate complex medical systems.

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RespectAbility Entertainment Professionals Lab, Summer 2023

Peter Forbes

Peter Forbes is a Film MFA Honors graduate from Columbia University. In spring 2022, he won the Ezra Litwak Award, Columbia’s most prestigious screenwriting prize, for his feature script Dream Kingdom. He also won the fall 2022 Big Apple Film Festival best TV horror/thriller award for his sci-fi thriller pilot script, Deep River, and placed as a 2022 Slamdance quarterfinalist and Austin Film Festival second rounder for his neo-Western crime drama pilot, Artesia. A neurodivergent writer, Peter was part of the 2022 cohort of the 1IN4 Coalition’s Disabled Writers Program. While attending Columbia, Peter also taught a semester-length screenwriting class to Columbia undergraduates.

Peter’s directing work has also earned accolades. His MFA thesis short, The Wood Thrush, won an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation production grant. It was selected for the 2023 New York International Children’s Film Festival and won Best Director at the 2022 Grand Junction Film Festival.

Peter grew up homeschooled in Colorado’s remote high desert, and its red mesas and jagged flatirons left an indelible mark on his imagination. A childhood filled with The Lord Of The Rings, Narnia, and Studio Ghibli inspires his own work—stories rich with worldbuilding, empathetic characters, and moving themes of hope and connection.

As a kid, he wrote fiction under his blankets by flashlight when he was “sleeping.” This marked the beginning of his creative writing, and he eventually sought a second MFA at Hamline University in Writing for Children and Young Adults. He graduated from Hamline in January 2022 and was honored to win the Anne Tews Schwab Award for Excellence in Critical Writing.

More importantly, he’s married to a wonderful woman and is stepdad to two kids and two orange cats.

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RespectAbility Entertainment Professionals Lab, Summer 2023

Rabiya Mansoor

Rabiya Mansoor (she/they) is a Pakistani-Calgarian comedian, writer, actor, producer, and recovering lawyer. She’s co-CEO of Window Dreams Productions Inc. and runs indie theatre company, Poetic License Creations. They have helped develop shows at CBC Gem, Crave, 9 Story, Big Bad Boo, and more. They are a writer for Dino Ranch (Disney Jr/CBC Kids), Strawberry Shortcake: Berry In The Big City (Netflix) and POV:ME (Shaftsbury Kids). Her current projects include: digital series Get Up, Aisha (CBC Gem, 2023); ½ hour mockumentary Layla Is Relevant (JFL ComedyPro Stand Up & Pitch Finalist; Bell Fund Slate Development program); ½ hour comedy Queer Guide To Matchmaking (Netflix-Banff Diversity of Voices Fellow; Reelworld E20; Bell Fund Slate Development program); and feature Dignify Me (CCA Research and Creation). She produced, co-wrote, and co-starred in the critically acclaimed, multi-award winning sketch comedy show, Don Valley Girls (Toronto Fringe Patron’s Pick; David Seguin Memorial Award for Accessibility in the Arts; Why Not Theatre’s RISER Toronto; Buddies in Bad Times Queer Pride Festival), which is currently being adapted into a digital series with the support of the Toronto Sketch Comedy Project Fund, IPF, and the OntarioCreates Futures Forward Fund. They’re an alum of Second City’s Bob Curry Fellowship for emerging, diverse comedic voices and has performed at the Toronto, Chicago, and Montreal Sketch Comedy Festivals, including as her drag king persona, Amin Yourhouse. They have participated in playwright units at Expect Theatre, Driftwood Theatre, and Tarragon Theatre and her play, A Jam Kind Of Day, was digitally staged in Driftwood Theatre’s Digital Short Play Festival. Her TYA improv show, Education Know-It-All, was commissioned for Theatre Direct’s Forward March Festival and they are a graduate of the BIPOC TV & Film Kids TV Intensive, where she returned as a Teaching Assistant (2022) and Mentor (2023). If you got this far, her bank password is Yugioh!.

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RespectAbility Entertainment Professionals Lab, Summer 2023

RJ LaRussa

RJ LaRussa is a Director of Photography working locally in New York City. RJ specializes in story-focused projects across narrative, music video, and commercial work. Their work has screened at SXSW, Chicago Critics Fest, Fright Fest London, and more.

He strives to bring naturalism and experimental techniques together to create visuals that serve the story of each individual project. RJ brings an empathetic approach to visual driven storytelling by focusing on a deep connection with the characters perspectives.

The relationship between people and the world around them is integral to their work as a storyteller. On set they consider experimentation and improvisation after careful planning as central to the artistic process.

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RespectAbility Entertainment Professionals Lab, Summer 2023

Sadie Fearon

Sadie Fearon is a screenwriter, lesbian, and multi-disciplinary artist from Northern California. After being diagnosed with a hereditary chronic illness at fifteen, Sadie dove deep into the lore of the unwell women who came before her- witches, rodeo queens, and back-alley abortionists, who all shared a furious need to create art. Inspired by her unique matrilineage, Sadie’s stories center around queerness, disability, and complex women. She has a passion for creating authentic stories with a healthy dose of magic and comedy, because nothing builds humor like being young, hot, and disabled.

Sadie graduated from the University of Southern California in 2021 with a BFA in Writing for Screen and Television. Her thesis script, A Nasty Habit, earned finalist and an honorable mention at Diverse Voices 2022, as well as quarterfinalist at Scriptapalooza, Big Break, and The Golden Script Competition.

Her earlier work, The Ramp Less Traveled, was a quarterfinalist at the Austin Film Festival in 2021.

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RespectAbility Entertainment Professionals Lab, Summer 2023

Sai Karan Talwar

Sai Karan Talwar is an award winning writer and director. Film has always been a passion for Sai dating back to growing up in his late Grandfather’s video shop. Being raised within and around the London Film Industry only cultivated this path, with family and friends spread around different functions of film and media, whether it be in marketing, directing, producing, distribution, acting and development.

Initially working with MADE from 2016; a charitable organization with an overall vision to contribute to reducing discrimination against BAME & LGBTQ+ Londoners, this resonated with Sai, being of Indian descent. Their first specific aim is to reduce prejudices about those communities and the second to increase career readiness for talent from those communities entering into the creative industries. In the last few years, MADE has run over 500 filmmaking workshops, 4 screening events with over 150 attendees, held an exhibition at BFI Southbank attracting over 1500 people, delivered 10 projects, and produced over 30 short films with 100,000+ online views. Winning Screenplay Competitions in 2018; Monkey Tree Bread Festival Finalist for Best Genre Screenplay and Awarded Best First Screenwriter in the London Film Awards, fuelled this drive further for Sai; to find ways of getting his ideas from the page to the screen.

Studying Economics and Finance at Durham University provided him with the skill set to learn how the film market ticks. Eventually, this was reflected with his undergraduate dissertation: ‘What are the key determinants of success for the box office within the UK motion picture industry?’ which received a first. This brought Karan to production companies such as Origin Pictures and 42 Management and Production, assisting within the development departments, where he assessed potential projects and aided in the development of ongoing projects. Currently, he is on the route to developing his own work.

As a writer, he has achieved over 20 accolades in the last year for my feature length screenplays, being a finalist in many prestigious festivals and competitions thus far such as: Vision Fest (Top 10 Finalist) Flicker’s Rhode Island International Film Festival, Screencraft, WeScreenplay, Scriptation, CWA, Finish Line, Big Apple International Film Festival, Vail Film Festival, Filmmatic, and many more.

His directorial debut short film Ghanimah has begun its festival run and is having its UK Premiere at the 25th UK Asian Film Festival, and North American Premiere at the LA Asian Film Festival and won Best Short Film at the New Delhi Film Festival, as well as, being selected at over a dozen festivals and winning four awards with a whole year to go, including being a finalist at World-fest Houston International Film Festival. The film is about Islamic Enrolment into the British Military. The film was shot in one day, on an independently financed budget of £9000.

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RespectAbility Entertainment Professionals Lab, Summer 2023

Shannon Rayne

Shannon Rayne is a Vancouver-based writer, educator, and former improv storyteller who got her start telling stories on stage with a troupe of dancers, musicians, and once a clown. Her playful and emotional narratives have inspired a range of creative collaborations, including a baritone opera singer whose career highlight surely was bellowing out her words: “beer fart.”

Her love of collaboration led her to writing for television and sketch comedy. Since completing an MFA in Creative Writing, she’s had several short films screen at the Toronto Sketch Comedy Festival, received top honours for two comedy TV pilots at the Austin Film Festival, and was selected for development mentorship by CBC Executives through their AccessCBC program for a half-hour comedy.

Shannon writes heartfelt and comedic stories about women and girls embracing unique paths. She draws inspiration from her own off-kilter path of leaving her anxiety research career to return to grad school after a head injury forced her to embrace change, uncertainty, and her passion for storytelling. When she’s not writing, she teaches creative writing to stuffed unicorns and the wee silly children who own them. Entertaining children (aka teaching kids online) has infused her writing with a playful sense of whimsy that she brings to all her scripts, collaborations, and dance breaks.

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RespectAbility Entertainment Professionals Lab, Summer 2023

Trevor Finn

Trevor has worked in the TV and film industry for over a decade as a writer, story editor, and script coordinator, and has extensive experience in production as well as in the writing room. Most recently, he worked on FOX’s crime anthology series Accused, the Guillermo Del Toro feature Nightmare Alley, and was in the writing room for the Spider-Man universe series Silk for Amazon/Sony. His credits also include Star Trek: Short Treks (CBS All Access), SEE (Apple TV+), Jupiter’s Legacy (Netflix), The Expanse (Syfy), Dark Matter (Syfy), and XIII: THE SERIES (Showcase).

As a writer with ADHD, due to the stigmas around disability, neurodiversity, and mental health, Trevor has had to mask his symptoms for most of his career. In order to help fight such stigmas, in recent years he has become more open about disclosing his condition, and more active within the entertainment industry’s disability community. In 2022 he was a community advisor to the inaugural Accessible Writers Lab, a Canadian program designed to increase accessibility for TV writers with disabilities, and was selected to be part of the newly formed Disability Screen Office’s delegation to the Content Canada Conference. He is also excited and honored to have been selected for the 2023 RespectAbility Entertainment Lab.

Trevor is an alumni of the Radio and Television Arts program at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University), a member of both the WGC and IATSE, and is represented by Oscars Abrams Zimel & Associates.

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