Jessie Keyt

Jessie Keyt is a writer, film scholar, and international story consultant. She co-authored Alternative Scriptwriting: Contemporary Storytelling for the Screen, and co-wrote the award-winning feature film, SKIN, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and received worldwide theatrical release. Her screenwriting has received development support and/or recognition from Euroscript/MEDIA II, the Sundance Screenwriters’ Lab, the Chesterfield/Writers’ Film Project, the Nicholl Fellowship, the International Writers’ Lab, and the Austin Film Festival. Her plays have been produced at the Cherry Lane Theater in New York City and Manhattan Theater Source. Her nonfiction and fiction have been published widely and awarded a Byrdcliffe residency, a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, and a Columbia Writing Program Fellowship. She is the Head of Screenwriting and an Associate Professor in the Department of Dramatic Writing at NYU Tisch, where she teaches graduate-level master classes on alternative scriptwriting and climate storytelling.  She has taught screenwriting at Columbia University, Sundance, and La Fémis, the French national film school; been a mentor for the Concordia Fellowship, Torino Film Lab, the Amplifier Fellowship, and the Cine Qua Non Film Lab; and has presented on climate storytelling for Sundance, the Torino Film Lab, the Venice Biennale and the Columbia Climate School. She co-founded Global Rise: Stories for the Future, which works with creatives across media to examine the interdisciplinary role of science, humanities, and imagination in crafting rich climate narratives. Jessie holds an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from Columbia’s School of the Arts, an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and a BA in English from Dartmouth College.