Lilly Wachowski’s Anarchists United Foundation is boarding Circle Management + Production’s Writers Discovery Fellowship as a co-partner.
The nonprofit organization, founded by the Matrix co-filmmaker during last summer’s strikes to address inequity in the entertainment industry, will financially support and help operate the program for unsigned TV writers from historically excluded backgrounds. Circle announced its rebrand from Circle of Confusion last week.
“Anarchists United is a response to the hyper-commodification of our industry, an attempt to carve out space for underrepresented artists who seem to be being pushed further into the margins,” Wachowski said in a statement. “This is antithetical to what filmmaking means to me. It is building in community. Our specific kind of communal art is analogous to what it means to be a human being.”
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Each year the Fellowship, which began in 2020, selects six participants, who each are assigned an industry mentor and receive a stipend as well as resources from in-kind partners Coverfly and Final Draft. By the end of the six-month program, the Fellows all will have developed pilot scripts ready to submit, as well as experience with general and pitch meetings and other forms of networking. One Fellowship pilot from a previous year, Charles Xavier Kilborn and Pages Matam’s The Hood is Full of Wishes, was recently optioned by ITV Studios America and will be produced by Anarchists United and Circle.
“The Fellowship committee has been thrilled with the growth of the Fellowship over its first three years, and we are so excited about the next phase of the program and our collaboration with Anarchists United,” Circle founder and partner Lawrence Mattis said in a statement. “The program continues to discover and support diverse vibrant creatives and, at the end of the day, uplifting emerging artists is what this industry should be about.”
Applications for the 2025 cohort will open in December. The 2024 participants, who began their experience last month, are:
Kristen Angonese (she/her) is a disabled, LGBTQ+ writer originally from a small town in Michigan who has lived several lives, ranging from engineering design for Swiffer/Mr. Clean to market research for the video game FarmVille. (Yes, that FarmVille). Realizing corporate life was killing her, she pivoted into screenwriting, and the rest is history. She loves creating immersive worlds or embellishing reality to make it more interesting. Yet, her stories are emotionally grounded, centered on strong women learning to embrace their best selves with the support of a found family.
Matthew Charles (he/him) is a Black, disabled storyteller with over a decade of experience across a variety of mediums. Raised in snowy Minnesota, he came to California for film school. Shocking to no one, he did not miss the winters. Since then, he’s written for film, television, podcasts, video games, tabletop gaming books, and, later this fall, comics. His goal is the same as it’s always been – to create worlds equal to the comics, video games and fantasy works that inspired him, and to tell the stories of the colorful outcasts he has been, known and loved all his life.
Sessen Mengist (she/her) is an Eritrean-American writer still reeling from the culture and, more importantly, the temperature shock of emigrating from East Africa to the suburbs of Minnesota. Inspired by the sci-fi and fantasy stories that helped her escape from reality during those early years in the US, her writing often explores morality and relationships in hypothetical, fantastical worlds. Her ideas usually start like 2000s film trailers: “in a world where…” She also enjoys adding African elements to her stories, taking inspiration from African cultures, languages and mythologies. Gratefully, she now resides in sunny L.A.
Taylor Stuckey (she/her) is a writer-director graduate of USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. She combines her illustrious career of being too online with an eclectic taste for trash and pulp to make art about the pain and humor of desire. To her, concepts like “representation,” “the self” and “wearing clothing in public” are soul-sucking traps. Her mission is to discover and create wholly original kinds of disgusting, off-putting stories. Like, just really upsetting overall.
Gilani Sumida-Moiseff (she/her) is a screenwriter from Honolulu, Hawaii. She began her career as a Location Department production assistant on the O’ahu, Hawaii sets of Kong: Skull Island. She then continued her career in episodic television and feature films on shows like Hawaii 5-0, Snatched, God Friended Me, FBI: Most Wanted, Only Murders in the Building, Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, and The Night Agent. She is a member of the International Brotherhood of Theatrical Teamsters 817 as a Location Department Coordinator and is currently based out of New York City. She is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University (Bachelor of Humanities and Arts) and New York University, Tisch School of the Arts Asia (Master of Fine Arts).
Peter Vicaire (he/him) is First Nations (Mi’gmaq) and grew up in Listuguj, a reservation in Quebec, Canada. He’s an honorably discharged U.S. Marine Corps veteran who served with the 8th & I Presidential Honor Guard in Washington D.C., as well as an infantry squad leader with 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines, 1st Marine Division. He has a master’s degree in military history and wields two law degrees – one Canadian (University of Ottawa) and another American (Michigan State University). Upon graduation, Peter was also selected as the Fellow for Michigan State University’s Indigenous Law and Policy Program. He has been published in several academic journals on Indian law topics. He now works for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs on behalf of Native American veterans, serving as a liaison with 74 Native American tribal governments across 14 states.
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