In Your Words

C.A. Johnson is a Brooklyn-based playwright originally from Metairie, Louisiana. She is a resident playwright at New Dramatists, and was MCC’s 2020 Tow Playwright-in-Residence. Her celebrated play, All the Natalie Portmans, received its premiere Off-Broadway at MCC in the winter of 2020. She was previously the 2018 P73 Playwriting Fellow, The Lark’s 2016-17 Van Lier Fellow, a Dramatists Guild Fellow, and a member of The Working Farm at Space on Ryder Farm. C.A. also has an active career in film and television, with several projects in development, including at ABC Signature, Netflix, and New Line. She has written for a number of television series, including an upcoming Hulu series from Drew Goddard.

Dr. David Renaud is a former medical doctor and a Supervising Producer on the Humanitas Award-winning and Golden Globe nominated ABC series The Good Doctor. He has also written on the CBS medical drama Pure Genius (created by Jason Katims) and the ABC primetime soap Blood & Oil. He was born and raised in Canada and holds both an MFA in Screenwriting from UCLA and an MD from the University of British Columbia. At the age of 19, David was in a near fatal car accident that left him paralyzed. He previously developed a medical drama for ABC with Sony Pictures, Josh Berman and Seth Gordon that was loosely based on his own life. David is committed to challenging preconceptions about people with disabilities and was recognized for his work on The Good Doctor by the Media Access Awards in 2019 (Visionary Award) and by Variety in 2018 (2018 Inclusion Impact Report). He is also committed to expanding opportunities for disabled artists in the industry and has served as a Faculty Advisor to the Respectability Summer Lab for Entertainment Professionals with Disabilities (2019, 2020, 2021). He is a proud father of two, an aspiring musician, and a decent chef. He recently survived three days of shooting in Joshua Tree National Park in July where he played the lead role in a short film.

Jenna Laurenzo is the award-winning Director, Writer, and Star of Lez Bomb. Lez Bomb made its premiere at Geena Davis‘ Bentonville Film Festival where it won the best narrative jury award. The film had a theatrical release in November 2018 and is now available on Amazon Prime. Lez Bomb was executive produced by Bobby Farrelly (There’s Something About Mary, Dumb & Dumber). Lez Bomb was Laurenzo’s follow-up to her short film, Girl Night Stand, an internet hit that garnered over 15 million views. Jenna received her BHA in Drama and English from Carnegie Mellon University and was selected for Shoot Online’s 2018 New Directors Showcase, and the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s 2018 Artist Academy. Jenna can be seen in Peter Farrelly‘s Academy Award winning Green Book. In 2020, Jenna was selected to participate in the inaugural class of Geena Davis‘ See It, Be It Filmmaker Fellowship. In February, 2021 Jenna released Girl Night Stand: Chapter Two, along with her first single, The River, a song she wrote for the follow-up short. Jenna’s currently developing her next feature with Ben Stiller‘s Red Hour Films.

Marilyn Fu is a Taiwanese-American writer. Her feature screenplay, The Honor List, was released in 2018 by Lionsgate. That same year, she headed the writer’s room on the Will Packer/Roma Downey-produced drama series The Baxters, based on the bestselling novels by Karen Kingsbury, for MGM. She wrote and co-produced The Sisterhood of Night (2015) based on a short story by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Steven Millhauser, and won an award for the screenplay at the Tribeca Film Festival. She is currently developing a limited series about the hate crime killing of Vincent Chin for Amazon Studios and Topic Studios, directed by Destin Daniel Cretton and executive produced by Cretton, Mynette Louie, and Asher Goldstein. Also in the works as a limited series is an adaptation of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song with producers Janet Yang, 3AD, and Concord. In features, she is adapting the award-winning LA Times article, A dying mother’s plan: Buy a gun. Rent a hotel room. Kill her son, directed by Eric Lin and produced by Mynette Louie, Andrew Corkin, Theo James, and starring Lucy Liu, as well as the YA novel 500 Words or Less by Juleah del Rosario for Gabrielle Union’s I’ll Have Another Productions. Marilyn was a researcher for T: The New York Times Style Magazine and a writer/reporter for LIFE Books; she has been involved in over forty publications for Time, Inc. Marilyn was educated at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where she was the first recipient of the William Goldman Screenwriting Fellowship. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, actor Graham Sibley, and their sons, Lyon and K.P.