Cinema and Media
Oberlin Screenwriters Intensive 2026
Over Winter Term, five mentors and eleven fellows gathered for three days of group intensives, mentoring sessions, panels and screenings. OSI is dedicated to nurturing distinctive voices in both features and television.
OSI 2026 Fellows
Anna Menta - Deeply Authentic and Personal (Screenplay): A once-successful playwright comes up with perfect “authentic and personal” play to revitalize her flagging career, after her spouse of 10 years comes out as a trans woman.
Harrison Demchick - Shipping and Handling (Screenplay): When nine-year-old Terry finds himself in contact with his recently deceased dad through 1970s comic book mail-order novelties, he and his streetwise classmate Nora set off on the road to track down his dad’s final message. But to find his way forward, he’ll have to learn that in life, and in grief, he is not alone.
Jonah Belsky & Maeve Hogan - We Count Bodies (Screenplay): A lonely boy falls in with a vigilante group of internet pedophile hunters, plunging him into a violent web of desire, debt, and deceit.
Kendra James - The Folks (Screenplay): Folklore nepobaby Josie Parris-Holt just wanted to survive junior year. But in Kith Harbor, bedtime stories jump off the page, and when a Headless Horseman starts haunting and hunting Josie’s town, calculus is quickly forgotten.
Lillian Li and Sam Krowcheko - Covenant (Screenplay): When a meek and pious deputy constable must deliver a razor-tongued accused witch across colonial Massachusetts to her ultimate trial, their journey through increasingly bizarre Puritan towns becomes a violent battle of wits.
Michael Simonds and Nicole Simonds - Alienation (Screenplay): A homicide detective and her sister must navigate their estranged father's sudden return while a series of grisly cult murders pushes the fractured family toward a deadly reckoning.
Oona O'Leary - Lake Superior Gives Up Her Dead (Screenplay): A people-pleasing innkeeper gets the opportunity of a lifetime on the same day the dead rise from Lake Superior’s warming waters, bringing with them an unignorable disease.
Sam Szabo - Lord Timothy (Screenplay): In the unstable aftermath of the American Revolution, an illiterate alcoholic blunders his way into becoming a captain of industry. Based on a true story.
Mentor Bios
Michele and Kieran Mulroney
Michele and Kieran Mulroney are Los Angeles based writer/directors with over 25 years experience in the industry. They are alumni of the 2004 Sundance Writers and Directors Labs where they developed their debut feature Paper Man, starring Emma Stone, Jeff Daniels, Ryan Reynolds, Lisa Kudrow and Kieran Culkin.
Writing credits include Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, starring Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law, and Power Rangers. Currently, they are casting their second feature directing project Fox Hills. Michele is developing a musical based on the works of Anton Chekhov. Kieran fronts the LA-based band, jackrabbit.
Kieran is a graduate of Columbia University. Michele graduated from the Royal Central School of Speech & Drama in London.
Michele is the President of the Writers Guild of America.
Julian Breece
Julian Breece is an award-winning writer-director whose work crosses film and TV. Notably, Breece wrote the screenplay for the Netflix film Rustin about gay Civil Rights strategist Bayard Rustin and the 1963 March on Washington. He co-wrote the Emmy-nominated Netflix series When They See Us and recently penned the screenplay for Fox Searchlight's forthcoming Alvin Ailey biopic, which will be helmed by Oscar-winner Barry Jenkins. Breece is a consulting producer on Lee Daniels' Sammy Davis Jr. limited series at Hulu, and he’s served as a writer and producer on such critically acclaimed series as Amazon’s Harlem and Hulu’s The First.
Allison Schroeder
Allison Schroeder is an Oscar, Writers Guild of America and BAFTA-nominated writer for Best Adapted Screenplay for the film Hidden Figures. Her other writing credits include Frozen 2, Minecraft, Christopher Robin and Heart of Stone. She currently has a feature in development at Amazon and a TV show in development at Skydance Sports. She holds a BA from Stanford University and an MFA from University of Southern California.
Aïda Mashaka Croal
Aïda Mashaka Croal was born in Vancouver, B.C., and raised in Surrey and Georgetown, Guyana. The Guyanese-Canadian playwright and screenwriter received her BA from Stanford University and her MFA in Playwriting from Columbia University’s School of the Arts.
An award-winning playwright, she began her TV career writing for ABC’s One Life to Live for which she won a Daytime Emmy. She has since written for Syfy (Sanctuary), Cartoon Network (Star Wars: The Clone Wars), AMC (Turn: Washington’s Spies), Netflix (Marvel’s Luke Cage and Jessica Jones) and Amazon (Outer Range). She was a co-showrunner for Y: The Last Man at FX. In addition, she has won a Saturn Award and been nominated for a Peabody Award.
Aïda is currently writing a pair of feature films – one for Netflix and the other for Universal Pictures.
Eric Heisserer
Eric Heisserer is most known for Arrival (2017), adapted from the Ted Chiang short story "Story of Your Life," and Bird Box (2018), based on the Josh Malerman novel. Eric has also served as showrunner for the Netflix series Shadow & Bone, and has written and directed Hours (2013), based on his own short story. His debut novel, Simultaneous, was published in October of 2025 and was picked as the November book for the Belletrist, and ranked in the top 20 sci-fi and fantasy books of the year on Amazon.