Sundance Institute Announces Yearly Episodic Lab Projects And Writing Fellows

deadline.com:

EXCLUSIVE: The Sundance Institute has revealed the 9 fellows and 8 projects selected for its 2021 to 2022 Episodic Program.The selected fellows are Aisha Bhoori (Pipe Dreams), Bridget McManus (The Family Pet), Corey Dashaun (Bottom Bitch), Elizabeth Palmore (Gives Good Death), Jeanette Lim and Marva Whitaker (Before the Apple), Jianna Maarten Saada (El Otro Lado), Mars Wolfe (The 1 & Only MJ Girls), and Meghan Ross (Here to Make Friends).

Four of the 8 projects are live-action dramas, three are live-action comedies, and one is an adult animation.This year marks the Episodic Lab’s return to in-person activities at the Sundance Mountain Resort in Utah bookended by a digital pre-lab story development curriculum and its first annual Episodic Pitch Parlor hosted in Los Angeles in partnership with XRM Media.“This was a year of many firsts and I hope to continue reinventing new systems of support for bold creators who are going overlooked,” said Episodic Program Director Jandiz Estrada Cardoso. “Audiences and networks are insatiable, thirsting for untouched stories.

So to any writer seeking to cut through and elevate their work, we have a mountain we can all scale together.”A breakdown of the projects can be found below.Pipe Dreams—from Pakistani-American writer Bhoori— is a half-hour buddy comedy that follows two quarter-life Muslim-American women who live above a hookah bar in Brooklyn, navigating love, work, and their ever-elusive dreams one puff of shisha at a time.The Family Pet—from Bridget McManus— is an hour-long family drama about a young woman who was hired by a wealthy psychiatrist to care for her precocious daughter, discovers the seven-year-old may be a serial killer in the making.Bottom Bitch—from Corey