W1-L2: A Beautiful Movie [video]

Your Instructor:

Barbara Nicolosi is the Founder and Chair Emeritus of Act One, Inc., a nonprofit program to train and mentor Christians for careers as Hollywood writers and executives. She is an Associate Professor in the Honors College at Azusa Pacific University in Azusa, CA.

Barbara is a member of the Writers Guild of America-West and has written screenplays for production companies in and beyond Hollywood. Her most recent project is a feature-length adaptation of the memoir A Severe Mercy for Origin Entertainment of Manhattan Beach, CA. Her screenplay Fatima, is scheduled to be shot in late 2016 in Rome, directed by Marco Pontecorvo and produced by Frida Torresblanco (Pan’s Labyrinth)

Barbara will receive her Ph.D. in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University in the UK in February 2017. She has a Masters in Film and Television from Northwestern University in Evanston IL, and a B.A. from the Great Books program at Northeast Catholic College in Warner, NH.  She has been a script analyst, production company executive, and consultant on scores of entertainment and media projects including The Passion of the Christ, TV shows Joan of Arcadia (CBS) and Saving Grace (TNT), and the animated video series Antenna Tales. In 2015, Barbara Executive Produced the award-winning short film In Memory for the Genesis Initiative, and the web series Ask J and Judgmental Moose for Franciscan University. She has produced five plays for the award-winning Actors Co-op Theater in Hollywood, including As You Like It, Fools, and The Devil’s Disciple.

A highly sought public speaker on art, culture, media and spirituality, Barbara has delivered hundreds of addresses at universities, conferences, churches and assemblies all over the world. She has been a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts, a judge for both the Gabriel Awards of the Catholic Academy of Communication Arts Professionals, a Blue Ribbon Panelist for the Angelus and Windrider Student Film Festival, and a reader for the Humanitas Prize for screenwriting.  She has received numerous awards including two Catholic Press Awards, the John Paul II Gravitas Award from the Diocese of Trenton, and the Lay Person of the Year Award from Legatus International.

Barbara has appeared as a cultural commentator on ABC, NBC, CBS, NPR and in the pages of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Premiere magazine, among many others.  Released in January, 2015, her most recent book, Notes to Screenwriters, was published by Michael Wiese Books.