Yahoo Lifestyle The Black List & WIF Set 2025 Episodic Lab Participants
EXCLUSIVE: The Black List and WIF have announced the participants for the 2025 Episodic Lab.
Seven up-and-coming television writers have been chosen for the selective and intensive Lab, which is now in its ninth year.
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Supported by the Golden Globe Foundation and Shivhans Pictures, the lab focuses on preparing women writers and writers of underrepresented genders for a career in writing television. The lab meets 2-3 times a week in March, with sessions that include master classes, workshops, and lectures from guest mentors.
Mentors this year include Krista Vernoff (Grey’s Anatomy), Julie Plec (The Vampire Diaries universe), Glen Mazzara (The Walking Dead), Nicole Jefferson Asher (P-Valley), Kassia Miller (High Potential), Sono Patel (Based on a True Story), Jane Becker (Nobody Wants This) and MJ Delaney (Ted Lasso).
Participants will also meet with a number of lab alumni mentors, including Anna Salinas (Loot), Alex Rubin (Sweet Magnolias), Hannah Stoddard & Jenny Ulmer (Reboot), Dagny Looper (Outer Range) and Colleen McAllister (Zokie of Planet Ruby).
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“It’s been a difficult time for our industry and for Los Angeles in particular, but the Black List and WIF remain committed to nurturing the next generation of television writers of all genders. To meet this moment in history, it’s imperative that we uplift and support their work,” said Megan Halpern, SVP at the Black List.
“This year’s incoming Episodic Lab cohort and the myriad stories they bring to the table are immensely impressive,” said Maikiko James, Senior Program Director at WIF. “We’re thrilled for them to join our thriving community of creatives that have come through this program.”
Over 50 writers have gone through the Episodic Lab since its inception in 2016, and nearly half of the lab alumni are currently staffed and working in television.
Submissions for the 2026 Episodic Lab opened today.
Meet 2025 Episodic Lab participants
Carolyn Klarecki – American Suffrage
American Suffrage – By 1913 women had fought for suffrage for 65 years without much progress. The young Quaker, Alice Paul, is done asking for the vote: she’s demanding it, beginning a militant movement to fight the police, press and elder suffragists themselves in the turbulent years before we became a true democracy.
A screenwriter from Big Rapids, Michigan, Carolyn Klarecki has worked as a Writers Assistant and Script Coordinator on shows like Alien: Earth, Fargo, Dune: Prophecy, Our Flag Means Death and more. She wrote and directed the short film Not As We Do, and she previously served as a Creative Executive at Unbranded Pictures. Klarecki graduated from the University of Michigan, where she was a writer and editor at The Michigan Daily.
Jessica Kozak – Open Your Eyes
Open Your Eyes – Three estranged sisters come together when they inherit an isolated farm after the death of their mother. They travel to the farm where their own dark pasts and deep secrets threaten to tear them further apart, and the arrival of unsettling neighbors forces them unknowingly into a bizarre ritual.
Jessica Kozak has an MFA in Screenwriting from UCLA. Herr feature script The Wild (fka Wilder Than Her) was selected for the Bloodlist as one of the best unproduced genre scripts of 2020. It was sold and became Jessica’s debut feature as writer/director. It screened at multiple festivals including the Atlanta Film Festival, Geena Davis’ Bentonville Film Festival, Brooklyn Horror Festival, Lower Eastside Festival pop-up, and was selected for Film Independent’s festival highlight online pick. It’s currently available on streaming from Vertical Entertainment. Before that, Jessica worked on The Bold Type and co-wrote the finale episode.
Kit Yan & Melissa Li – Lucky
Lucky – When his father’s gambling addiction puts the family restaurant at risk, a trans porn star struggling with body dysmorphia is thrust into an arranged marriage with a woman from China, and he must keep his true self hidden from his new wife in order to protect his family.
Melissa Li (she/her) and Kit Yan (they/he/she) are a Queer writing team, who were formerly enemies and now best friends. Kit loves a heart-warming family story and Melissa can’t resist a good dark crime thriller. Together, they have been writing subversive comedies and emotionally intimate dramas for over 17 years. With backgrounds in theater, they are recipients of the Jonathan Larson Grant, Kleban Prize, ASCAP Harold Adamson Lyric Award, and The Vivace Award. They have previously sold a live-action feature to Disney Channel, and are repped by WME and Writ Large.
Nikki Palumbo – Lil Italy
Lil Italy – After her father goes to prison, a thirtysomething car saleslesbian inherits his place as the head of a New Jersey mob and tries to continue the family business-and reorganize crime-in her own queer, millennial, how-do-you-hold-a-gun way.
Nikki Palumbo is a non-binary writer and comedian based in Los Angeles, but their New Jersey roots are strong. Their writing has appeared in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, Reductress, Comedy Central Digital, the Google Assistant, Barbie’s Webby-nominated TikTok, and their folks’ fridge. Most recently, they wrote for the WGA Award-nominated Tiny Time Travel on PBS Kids and apologetically for Google’s AI, Gemini. In 2022, Nikki won the ATX TV Festival Pitch Competition with their project Lil Italy and made climate-conscious comedy as an inaugural fellow of Generation 180’s Climate Comedy Cohort. Nikki writes subversive queer comedy, mostly by accident.
Rae Binstock – Butch
Butch – A lesbian private detective takes on the filth, glamour, and corruption of 1970s New York as she investigates a series of murders targeting the city’s newly radicalized gay community.
Rae Binstock (BA, Columbia) is a playwright and screenwriter whose ensemble dramas reflect the harsh climate, acid humor, and multicultural frictions of her Massachusetts upbringing. Her plays have been produced by the New Group, Salt Lake Acting Company, and the Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Festival, while her drama Relentless will debut at Syracuse Stage in 2026. Rae was the writers’ assistant for FX Networks’ Fosse/Verdon and Apple TV+’s Schmigadoon. She co-authored the Climate Storytelling Playbook. She is an Almanack Screenwriters and Dramatists Guild Fellow, and 2023 Grand Prize Winner for WeScreenplay, Screencraft, and others. She lives in Los Angeles with her cats, Lila and Garlic.
Shay Ball – Dani After Dark
Dani After Dark – A socially anxious slow jams radio host navigates her adoptive mother’s dementia diagnosis, the surprise return of her birth mother, and the overall uncertainty of new adulthood in a pre-tech, late 90s version of the San Francisco Bay Area.
Shay Ball is a screenwriter from the San Francisco Bay Area. She started her early career working as a government consultant before pivoting to screenwriting in 2013. Her projects have placed in the We Screenplay Diverse Voices Screenwriting Competition, the Moonshot Pilot Accelerator, and the Harvardwood Writing Competition. A 90’s obsessed book lover with a fondness for happy endings, Shay went from elementary school to high school in a little over a year thanks to extremely poor timing and a multiple choice test. She continues to make up for lost time as a writer of diverse comedy-dramas.
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