It was difficult to write (my pilot) Piney Ridge. During the more challenging scenes, I cried. I cried because it was scary. There were scenes on the page I had never seen before on television. Great stories written in this way can impact the world and this is how I choose to write.
La'Chris Jordan
Novelist, Playwright, Actor, Filmmaker
BIOGRAPHY
LA’CHRIS JORDAN is a novelist, playwright, actor and filmmaker who recently made her directorial debut with JANUARY 14TH which is an Official Selection of the Academy Award-Qualifying 2020 Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles, CA, and winner for Best Short and Best Director at the 2019 Top Indie Film Awards. La'Chris was also a recent winner in The Script Lab's 2019 Screenplay Contest which received over 5,000 submissions. In addition to this competition, La’Chris has received over 50 awards, grants and honors including being named ‘One of the 50 Playwrights to Watch’ by the Dramatists Guild and a Semifinalist for the extremely competitive Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwriting Program at Juilliard. Jordan’s body of work includes themes such as injustice, oppression, corruption, and the duality of human nature, particularly as it relates to women struggling for equality in a patriarchal society.
Many of Jordan’s works are inspired by historical events such as her TV pilot PINEY RIDGE which has placed in over a dozen high-profile screenwriting labs and competitions such as the Sundance Episodic Story Lab, MACRO Episodic Lab, Austin Film Festival Screenwriting Competition (Second Rounder), Screencraft Pilot Launch Competition, WeScreenplay Diverse Voices Fellowship, the SAGindie Fellowship and the Film Empire's Diversity Screenplay Contest.
La’Chris recently completed her semi-autobiographical feature, ROSES IN THE WATER which is an adaptation of her award-winning play. Her other screenwriting credits includes the award-winning political drama THE SOURCE and the historical drama THE RIDGE (Semifinalist, 2017 Fade In Awards; Semifinalist, 2017 Cinequest Screenwriting Competition) which is slated for production in Fall 2020.
La’Chris’ plays have been produced and developed at the Kennedy Center, Urban Stages, ACT Theatre, Seattle Rep, Arkansas Rep, the NAACP Theatre Festival, Robey Theatre, the National Black Theatre Festival and the Essential Theatre in Washington, DC, to name a few. Additionally, her work has been funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the D.C. Commission on the Arts & Humanities, the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, Artist Trust, and many more.
In addition to her work for the stage and screen, La'Chris is a published poet, novelist (Musings of an Eccentric Dreamer, The Memories of Bellevue, The Roses I Left Behind) and script reader and story analyst for major screenwriting competitions. An alumni of the University of Washington's School of Communications, La'Chris is also the founder of BlackCinemadb.com, an entertainment and online movie database of films from the African-American and African diaspora.