Today the nonprofit Sundance Institute announced the fellows selected for the 2026 Screenwriters Lab and Screenwriters Intensive programs, which foster creativity and bold risk-taking, empower emerging voices, and support the development and launch of their first and second features. Selected from over 3,800 submissions, the 11 Screenwriters Lab fellows will convene in a connected community to work under the guidance of esteemed advisors to develop their original scripts. The Screenwriters Lab will take place from January 17–21 at the Sundance Mountain Resort in Utah, where the Sundance Institute labs originated in 1981. This year’s lab is being held in celebration of the mission and legacy of founder Robert Redford.

The lab will be led by Michelle Satter (Founding Senior Director, Sundance Institute’s Artist Programs) and Ilyse McKimmie (Deputy Director, Feature Film Program), with artistic director Jessie Nelson and creative advisors Michael Arndt, Scott Z. Burns, Linda Yvette Chávez, Scott Frank, Phil Hay, Barry Jenkins, Meg LeFauve, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Nicole Perlman, Howard A. Rodman, Dana Stevens, Lulu Wang, Virgil Williams, and Doug Wright. 

“We’re excited to champion this new cohort of bold filmmakers developing their original stories in our January Screenwriters Lab,” said Michelle Satter, Founding Senior Director, Sundance Institute’s Artist Programs. “These 11 fellows will hone their screenwriting skills while immersed in the collaborative creative community we envisioned and established to sustain the future of independent filmmakers. Following the lab, we are fully committed to supporting their journey from script to screen, ensuring that their powerful, human stories in all genres are celebrated and connect with audiences around the world.”

The Screenwriters Intensive will be held March 5–6 online, where 13 writers across nine projects will develop their first fiction features. Alumni of the Screenwriters Intensive include Tory Kamen (Eleanor the Great), Reinaldo Marcus Green (Monsters and Men), Roger Ross Williams (Cassandro), Laurel Parmet (The Starling Girl), and Vuk Lungulov-Klotz (Mutt).

“The artists and projects included in this year’s Screenwriters Intensive comprise an impressively wide range of singular perspectives and storytelling styles,” said Ilyse McKimmie, Deputy Director of the Feature Film Program. “What they have in common is unforgettable cinematic vision, and we couldn’t be more excited to support them every step of the way on the journey of bringing their films to life.”

For over four decades, the Sundance Institute Feature Film Program (FFP) labs have supported and championed an exciting and groundbreaking array of independent filmmakers. Four notable filmmakers who wrote and directed films released in 2025 developed their debut features at the Feature Film Labs: Paul Thomas Anderson (One Battle After Another), Ryan Coogler (Sinners), Chloé Zhao (Hamnet), and Nia DaCosta (Hedda). Additionally, Guillermo del Toro (Frankenstein) developed his second feature at the FFP’s first Screenwriters Lab in Mexico. Other FFP alumni include The Daniels (Swiss Army Man), Sean Wang (Dìdi (弟弟)), A.V. Rockwell (A Thousand and One), Charlotte Wells (Aftersun), Nikyatu Jusu (Nanny), Sterlin Harjo (Four Sheets to the Wind), Radha Blank (The 40-Year-Old Version), Eliza Hittman (Beach Rats), Marielle Heller (The Diary of a Teenage Girl), Walter Salles (Central Station), Dee Rees (Pariah), Robert Eggers (The Witch), Ritesh Batra (The Lunchbox), Benh Zeitlin and Lucy Alibar (Beasts of the Southern Wild), Gina Prince-Bythewood (Love & Basketball), Miranda July (Me and You and Everyone We Know), and Quentin Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs), among many others. 

Five projects supported by the Feature Film Program will premiere at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival: Beth de Araújo’s Josephine, Ramzi Bashour’s Hot Water, Suzanne Andrews Correa’s The Huntress (La Cazadora), Olive Nwosu’s LADY, and Walter Thompson-Hernández’s If I Go Will They Miss Me. In addition, FFP alumni premiering new work in this year’s Festival include Gregg Araki, Alex Huston Fischer, and Nicole Holofcener, and two lab-supported films, Half Nelson and Mysterious Skin, are screening in the Park City Legacy section. Feature Film Program–supported films that have premiered internationally in the past year include Hasan Hadi’s The President’s Cake (winner, Caméra d’Or and Directors Fortnight Audience Award at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival; Iraq’s Academy Award submission) and Diego Céspedes’ The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo (winner, Un Certain Regard prize at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival; Chile’s Academy Award submission.)

The projects selected for the 2026 January Screenwriters Lab and the artists attending are: 

Sarah Friedland (Writer-director) with The Queue (U.S.A.): Based on the 1983 novel by Vladimir Sorokin, The Queue is an absurd, picaresque fable. Set across three hot summer days in an endless line, The Queue follows Max and his neighbors as they wait for the things they need — and want — to live.

Sarah Friedland is a filmmaker and choreographer working at the intersection of moving images and moving bodies. Friedland’s debut feature, Familiar Touch, earned critical acclaim at the Venice Film Festival, where she received both the Lion of the Future and the Horizons Award for Best Director.

Aditi Brennan Kapil (Writer-director) with Love Person (U.S.A.): A one-night stand between Vic and Ram mistakenly results in a series of email exchanges between Ram and Vic’s Deaf sister, Free. The emails blossom into an unconventional romance that draws Ram and Vic closer, but exposes the fault lines in Free’s relationship with her own longtime partner, Maggie.

Aditi Brennan Kapil is a playwright, director, and television writer. She is of Bulgarian and Indian descent and was raised in Sweden prior to moving to the U.S. Her award-winning plays have been produced internationally. Love Person, adapted from her play,will be her feature film debut.

Taylor Sanghyun Lee (Writer-director) with Rounds (U.S.A.): Years after a violent shooting shattered their Presbyterian church community, an impending deportation forces two Korean American families to confront the limits of their forgiveness.

Taylor Sanghyun Lee is a software engineer turned filmmaker. He is a recipient of the Sundance Institute Ignite Fellowship, CJ & TIFF K-Story Fund prize, Marcie Bloom Fellowship in Film, ARRI Volker Bahnemann Award, and Spike Lee Production Fund. He earned his MFA from the NYU Tisch Graduate Film program, where he was an Ang Lee Scholar.

Naishe Nyamubaya (Writer-director) with Black Snake (Zimbabwe): A family is forced to face their true cultural identity when the appearance of a mysterious tree coincides with their move to a rural village.

Naishe Nyamubaya is a Zimbabwean filmmaker passionate about telling African stories. He is an alum of Cannes Cinéfondation’s L’Atelier, TIFF Directors’ Lab, The Red Sea Lodge, Locarno Open Doors, and Film Independent’s Global Media Makers.

Bec Pecaut (Writer-director) with The Terrible Child (Canada): The Terrible Child follows 16-year-old Augusta Goodman over a period of four months in her hometown of Toronto in 2009. Gussie’s desire to be a normal teenager is challenged by her dawning sexuality and her family as they cope with the end of her father’s long-term battle with cancer.

Bec Pecaut is a transmasc filmmaker from Toronto. Their debut short film, Are You Scared to Be Yourself Because You Think That You Might Fail? (2024), had its domestic premiere at TIFF ’24, where it won the Short Cuts Award for Best Canadian Film, and its international premiere at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.

Joanna Rothkopf (Writer-director) with Attachment (a.k.a. Bluey is the Warmest Color) (U.S.A.): A mother becomes dangerously obsessed with a wildly popular children’s entertainer in this arch erotic thriller. It’s Fatal Attraction meets All Fours meets Ms. Rachel. Somehow.

Joanna Rothkopf is a writer and filmmaker living in Brooklyn. Since 2019, she has worked as a senior writer on HBO’s Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, for which she has won multiple Emmy and WGA Awards. Her short film Pet Store, which she directed and produced, played festivals in 2024.

Philip Thompson (Writer-director) with Dance Monkey Dance (U.S.A.): Told through TV clips, voicemails, and personal recordings, this fictional found-footage documentary follows 2000s Black comedian Wesley Harris, whose fame, built on stereotypes for white audiences, warps his sense of self and exposes the media’s praise as a form of control.

Philip Thompson is a filmmaker from New England, based in Brooklyn, who was included as one of Filmmaker magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film.” His work investigates popular media’s influence on culture and the one-sided “looking” relationship between audiences and image subjects.

George Watsky (Writer-director) with yellowwood (U.S.A.): Zoe and Jordie, a couple who never wanted kids, confront an unexpected pregnancy. Rather than choose between diverging futures, they enter a radical tech experiment that lets them walk both paths — one with a child, one without. As their realities fray, they learn no life is lived without sacrifice.

George Watsky is a multidisciplinary artist from San Francisco. Performing music as Watsky, he has also appeared in HBO’s Def Poetry, Blindspotting, Arrested Development, and on Broadway in Freestyle Love Supreme. His essay collection, How to Ruin Everything (Plume), was a New York Times bestseller.

Cecelia Wheeler (Writer-director) with Clear-Cut (U.S.A.): Estranged siblings Angeline and Frank attempt to reconcile while on a road trip to the Olympic Peninsula to meet Frank’s son for the first time.

Cecelia Wheeler is a writer-director from Seattle, Washington. A graduate of Columbia University’s Film MFA, her work has been supported by Indian Paintbrush and the Sloan Foundation. She writes characters who want to be bigger than themselves, setting small dilemmas against the grandeur of nature.

Said Zagha (Writer-director) with Black Harvest (Palestine, France, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar): After his son is killed, a Palestinian father’s pursuit of vengeance drags him into a brutal spiral of crime and corruption that could destroy his remaining family.

Said Zagha is a Palestinian British writer-director working in political genre cinema. His short film Coyotes premiered at the Venice Film Festival, won Best Short Film at the BFI London Film Festival, and is now BAFTA-qualified. Black Harvest will be his debut feature.

Renee Zhan (Writer-director) with BAOBAO (U.K.): A spoiled only daughter returns home to China to discover that her parents have had another child. Her parents refuse to see that there is something unnatural about their new baby boy and that an evil presence haunts their stately home.

Renee Zhan is a Chinese American director and animator. In her films, she explores topics of identity, obsession, and sexuality — all things beautiful, ugly, and squishy. Her first live-action short film, SHÉ (SNAKE), screened at the Sundance Film Festival in 2024. BAOBAO is her feature debut.

The following artists and projects have been selected for the 2026 Screenwriters Intensive: 

Nicole Daddona and Adam Wilder (Co-writers/Co-directors) with CACS (U.S.A.): Two cacti uproot from their home in the desert and experience the trappings of human life in a fading small town.

Nicole Daddona is a multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, actress, and musician. The creator of cult-favorite brand Magic Society and the glam-pop persona Friday, she builds immersive, offbeat, uncanny worlds — rich with humor, heart, and nostalgia — across film, fashion, and music.

Adam Wilder is an auteur director and writer whose shorts have screened at the Sundance Film Festival and SXSW and been featured as Vimeo Staff Picks and Short of the Week. He champions singular stories with idiosyncratic characters, sharp visuals, and a balance of absurdity and sincerity.

Julien Figueroa (Writer) with Hatepark (U.S.A.): In the year 2000, a sullen androgynous teen falls in with a group of skate punks after being misread as a boy. They spend the long Florida summer relishing their new boyhood — much needed fun as they cope with a new stepfamily and a shifting image of their father, whom they once idolized.

Julien Figueroa is a comedian, trinket collector, and recent graduate from DePaul University’s Screenwriting MFA. There, he studied comedic storytelling and improv with The Second City. He writes about black sheep in small southern towns and coming-of-age stories for burnt-out 20-somethings.

Allison Janae Hamilton (Writer-director) with Floridaland (U.S.A.): In early-2000s North Florida, a college student with an empathic gift drifts between campus life and her family’s fading casino. As buried tensions and spiritual inheritances surface, an unexpected occurrence forces a reckoning with belonging, legacy, and the dreamlike landscape that binds them.

Writer-director Allison Janae Hamilton is known for her mythic explorations of landscape and Americana. She has presented work at MoMA, MASS MoCA, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and BlackStar. Her short film Wacissa was acquired by the Smithsonian. She holds an MFA from Columbia and a Ph.D. from NYU.

Gulet Isse (Writer-director) with Khutbah (U.S.A.): Abu is a high school senior torn between pursuing a professional career as a comic artist or making his immigrant parents proud by attending an Islamic university. As he develops a romance with a boy at his mosque, Abu must balance the conflicting demands of tradition, family, and his deepest desires.

Gulet Isse is a Somali American filmmaker whose stories focus on unearthing shame, people leading double lives, and unconventional family structures. Her work has been recognized by Sundance Institute, the Transgender Film Center, Film Fatales, the Center for Cultural Power, and Lambda Literary.

Daeil Kim (Writer-director) and Don Cabreana (Writer) with Stem (South Korea, U.S.A.): A devoted scientist risks everything to win the approval of the world’s leading stem cell pioneer, only to be pulled into the dark secrets behind his “miracle cure” that claims it can end human disability. Recipient of the Sundance Institute | Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Development Fellowship.

Daeil Kim is a South Korean–born filmmaker based in Los Angeles and a recipient of the 2024 Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Grant. His work has screened at the Sundance Film Festival, the Cannes American Pavilion, and AFI Fest. He holds an MFA from USC, where he was an Annenberg Fellow.

Don Cabreana is an Oakland-born playwright who staged four plays while earning UC Berkeley degrees in theater and English. After gaining a USC Screenwriting MFA, he won multiple screenwriting contests. He writes high-concept stories featuring flawed characters fighting for justice and redemption.

Esteban Pedraza (Writer-director) with Swayneos (U.S.A., Colombia): When a young woman in Bogotá marries an older man from Nashville through a mail-order bride service, she transforms herself into a Southern, Christian wife in exchange for the promise of America.

Esteban Pedraza is a Colombian American filmmaker with various award-winning projects and premieres at top-tier festivals. His latest short film, Bogotá Story, had its world premiere at the 80th Venice International Film Festival in 2023. It is now available to stream via The New Yorker.

Matthew Rosenbaum and Nicolette Johnson (Co-writers/Co-directors) with Badstar (U.S.A.): Kissimmee, Florida — 2003. Anomalous events concerning a gender-questioning 11-year-old and his girl doppelgänger constellate around the failure of NASA’s Columbia space mission. 

Matthew Rosenbaum is a visual artist and filmmaker addressing themes of personal and collective memory through a surreal, tragicomic lens. His film The Dreaming of a Country Merchant,starring Peter Sarsgaard, is in development. He is represented by CAA and is an alumnus of the NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

Nicolette Johnson is Brooklyn-based writer-director and artist whose studio practice includes sculpture, collage, and film. Her art practice dissects social paradigms of violence and gender, fueling cathartic expressions of queerness. She is an alum of the NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

Samina Saifee (Writer-director) with Amerigirl (U.S.A.): At Camp Amerigirl, 12-year-old Aaliyah Khan wants one thing: to make a friend. When the cooler Brown girl arrives, she finally sees her chance.

Samina Saifee holds a dual degree from NYU Tisch and Stern, where she studied film and business. She is a 2024 Sundance Institute Ignite fellow and a Sundance Institute and Islamic Scholarship Fund fellow. Her latest short, Ayat, stars Ramy’s Laith Nakli, and she recently wrapped her first documentary short, Mango Man, set in India.

Sylvie Weber (Writer-director) and Anouk Shad (Writer-producer) with Río Masacre (Austria, Dominican Republic): Sent from Austria to the Dominican-Haitian border, 16-year-old Rio grows close to a sharp-witted local girl and is drawn into a world of cockfights and ancestral ghosts. As the Río Masacre’s legacy resurfaces, he must confront buried family wounds and decide where he belongs.

Sylvie Weber is a German Dominican filmmaker exploring belonging, history, and mysticism through a poetic, surreal lens. Her films have screened at BlackStar, BAM, and LA Film Forum. She was a 2025 Indeed/Hillman Grad Rising Voices fellow and part of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 2023 Creators Lab.

Anouk Shad is an Austrian writer and producer with South Sudanese roots. She is the founder of the production company Ripe and the BIPOC film network Gewächshaus, committed to globally resonant storytelling and to building infrastructures that empower independent voices.