Deadline: Inevitable Foundation Announces Elevate Collective Award Winners
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Inevitable Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to helping disabled screenwriters reach their full commercial and creative potential, has selected its Spring 2023 Elevate Collective Award winners.
Lydia Caradine, Halo Starling, Alys Murray, Zayre Ferrer, and Filipe Coutinho will each receive a $5,000 grant to invest in career coaching, professional development, script consultation, work-from-home setups, and intellectual property acquisition. It also offers community building and professional networking opportunities for members and ongoing support from the Inevitable Foundation team.
“We are proud to support these talented disabled screenwriters with $5,000 professional development grants, which will help them level-up their careers and projects” Inevitable Foundation co-founders Richie Siegel and Marisa Torelli-Pedevska said in a joint statement.
Disabled people make up 20 percent+ of the population but represent less than 1 percent of writers behind the screen”The foundation focuses on increasing the odds of success for disabled creatives by helping to break down barriers preventing them from unlocking their full potential.”
You can read more about the winners below.
Lydia Caradine (she/her) is a writer, artist and Stella Adler-trained actress originally from Cleveland, OH. She writes TV and features to exorcize the demons of generational trauma and uplift herself and others. Her work spans comedies, dramedies and historical dramas, the latter of which secured her place in the 2021 ScreenCraft Pilot Competition and 2021 Black List/WIF Episodic Lab, in addition to being selected as a 2022 ATX pitch finalist. Lydia lives with Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome and Dyscalculia, and is represented by Shakira Hedgpeth at Kaplan Stahler Agency.
Halo Starling (they/he) is a writer, director, and performer worldbuilding positive futures in the husk of the capitalist experiment. As a queer and trans artist of immigrant experience with invisible disabilities, Starling’s multi-hyphenate work in film, TV, video and performance explores what it means to be trapped inside of structures that are meant to help you. The feature script for Starling's MFA thesis film PONY advanced to the second round of Sundance Institute’s 2022 Development Track, and was in the top 10% of Academy Nicholls Fellowship 2022 submissions. They are represented by Lawrence Mattis and Zach Cox at Circle of Confusion as a writer and director.
Alys Murray (she/her) writes crowd-pleasing genre fare for the romantic in all of us. Born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, she obtained her undergraduate degree in Playwriting from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. After writing three internationally best-selling novels with Grand Central Publishing, she transitioned to writing features and working as a romance and comedy-focused script doctor for companies such as Hallmark, Lifetime, and ViacomCBS. She is represented by CAA’s Matt Felker and Norris Brooks.
Zayre Ferrer (they/them) is a TV writer, producer, and screenwriter who was born in Panama and grew up in Brooklyn. They write character driven stories that use comedy to navigate human experience. They were the Creator and Executive Producer of the Netflix original drama series Tijuana and Co-Produced on David Jenkins and Taika Waititi’s period comedy Our Flag Means Death for HBO Max. Their rom-com screenplay Stupid Cupid is currently in development at Netflix.
Filipe Coutinho (he/him) is a filmmaker living with OCD with a passion for character-driven, inclusive, and commercial stories. His unique cultural perspective is highlighted by his background as an immigrant from a small town in Portugal. He has several projects in development, including a book adaptation by a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, a Portuguese cerebral thriller, and the reimagining of an offbeat New Yorker article. His script, Jambusters, made the 2022 Annual Black List, and he’s also a Black List Feature Lab alum, in which he was mentored 1-on-1 by Beau Willimon & Jack Thorne. Filipe’s repped by Matt Rosen at Rain.
Applications for Elevate Collective and Elevate for Podcasters are now open.
