Do The Write Thing

Felicia Pride is a TV writer / producer and an award-winning filmmaker. She wrote on Ava DuVernay‘s Queen Sugar and was most recently a producer on Grey’s Anatomy. Prior to the WGA strike, she was developing shows with Amazon, Netflix, and FX. In film, she’s the writer and executive producer of Really Love, produced by MACRO, which debuted on Netflix and became a Top Ten Movie on the platform. And she’s sold features to Universal, Sony, and AGC Studios. She made her directorial debut with tender, a short film which aired on STARZ, and she is currently on the festival circuit with Look Back At It, a proof of concept for her directorial feature debut by the same name. She founded and runs Honey Chile, a production company catering to Black women 40+ and is the co-host of their NAACP-nominated podcast Chile, Please. Felicia was a Film Independent Screenwriting Lab Fellow and a graduate of NBC’s Writers on the Verge program as a comedy writer. She started her writing career nearly twenty years ago as an entertainment journalist before going on to write several books, including the essay collection, The Message: 100 Life Lessons from Hip-Hop’s Greatest Songs. Prior to transitioning to screenwriting, she worked as a film distribution exec and an impact producer. Felicia holds an M.A. in writing from Emerson College and runs The Create Daily, a resource for underrepresented storytellers that she founded in 2012.

Jessica Sharzer has developed feature films for Universal, HBO, MTV, 20th Century Fox, Fox 2000, Sony, Lionsgate, Netflix, and Paramount. Her produced features include Nerve (2015) and A Simple Favor (2018). She is currently writing the sequel Another Simple Favor for director Paul Feig at Amazon. Recent projects include original sex comedy London Calling for Universal, an adaptation of Hitchcock’s To Catch A Thief for Paramount and a remake of the 1983 cult classic The Hunger for Warner Brothers. In television, Ms. Sharzer has developed drama pilots for CBS, FOX, MTV, Apple, and ABC networks. Recent projects include political thriller The Embassy for Starz and true crime series Over My Dead Body for Warner Brothers. She was a Co-Executive Producer on Nine Perfect Strangers on Hulu and American Horror Story for FX. As a director, Ms. Sharzer made her feature debut with Speak (2004) which premiered at Sundance and was nominated for Writers Guild and Directors Guild awards. Ms. Sharzer holds Masters Degrees from NYU and UC Berkeley. She is an adjunct professor of screenwriting and script analysis at USC.

Peres Owino is an award-winning Kenyan-American filmmaker whose feature directorial debut, Bound: Africans vs African-Americans, played dozens of festivals around the world winning the Women In Film- Lena Sharpe Award at the Seattle International Film Festival, the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles, and the Best Film Directed by a Woman of Color Award at the African Diaspora Film Festival in New York . Her short film, Stray, produced by 20th Century Fox Digital, premiered at Canneseries and was part of 2020 Huluween. Peres is currently prepping her second feature, The Basket Weaver, based on her original screenplay that won the International Screenwriters Association Fast Track Fellowship and NYWIFT & Meryl Streep Writer’s Lab Competition. Her TV credits include the Netflix 2023 global hit, Queen Cleopatra, African Queens: Njinga, and her TV movie, Seasons of Love, which was produced by Taraji P. Henson and received an NAACP Image Award nomination for Outstanding Writing of a Television Movie. She is also developing shows for Gaumont TV and WBTV. Peres performs comedy across Los Angeles, and a collection of her musings are featured in her debut novel, On The Verge. She is repped by Creative Artists Agency (CAA) and Morris, Levine et al.

Rebecca Murga is a Chicago-born, Latinx WGA writer who works in Los Angeles as a filmmaker. She produces and directs films, commercials, documentaries and branded content in both English and Spanish. Past clients include ABC, CBS, CBS Sports, Mundo FOX, NHL, MLB, NBA, Comcast, ESPN, Mid-Atlantic Sports Network, HBO Boxing, US ARMY, AT&T, Lucent, Verizon, Merck & Co., Walgreens, Evan Williams, and A&E Networks. She is currently the Director of the AFI Directing Workshop for Women (DWW), a hands-on training program committed to increasing the number of women and gender non-binary artists working professionally as narrative screen directors, and is also currently one of the eight creators in the Dan Lin / Rideback TV incubator produced by Rideback Television with financing and other support by MRC. Rebecca served as a U.S. Army Captain and Public Affairs Officer, and has deployed to Iraq, Kuwait, and Afghanistan. She was awarded a Bronze Star for her work with the Special Operations Command in Afghanistan, and was also was awarded the Meritorious Service Medial for her service in Iraq. Rebecca completed the 2016-2018 Disney / ABC Directing Program. The two-year professional directing program, which spans two television seasons based upon ABC’s production calendar, recruits experienced directors on the cusp of making the transition into episodic directing.