Annie J. Howell
Adjunct Teacher
Annie J. Howell is a screenwriter and director. Her first feature, co-written and co-directed with Lisa Robinson, was SMALL, BEAUTIFULLY MOVING PARTS (starring Anna Margaret Hollyman and Andre Holland), which premiered at SXSW in 2011 and went on to play festivals world wide and in art house theaters across the nation. Her second feature with Robinson, CLAIRE IN MOTION, stars Betsy Brandt and premiered at SXSW 2016. Distributed by Breaking Glass Pictures, the film played in theaters in 2017, as well as on Showtime and streaming services. LITTLE BOXES, which she wrote (directed by Rob Meyer and starring Melanie Lynskey and the late Nelsan Ellis) also premiered in 2016 at the Tribeca Film Festival, where it sold to Netflix. That script is the recipient of an IFP Emerging Narrative Award for Best Feature and a San Francisco Film Society/Kenneth Rainin Foundation grant. The film premiered theatrically in April ’17 and is now on Netflix. Howell is an alumna of Whitman College, NYU's Graduate Film program (class of ’01), the Screenwriters Colony and IFP’s Emerging Narrative. She grew up in the Arizona desert and has lived in the other corners of the U.S. — the Pacific Northwest and the South — as well as the middle, in Appalachian Ohio. She now lives on Roosevelt Island in the East River with her husband, film theorist Michael Gillespie, and their two sons.