Alumnus Toby Fell-Holden '13 To Participate in 1497 Writer's Lab 2020

Alumnus Toby Fell-Holden '13 was chosen as one of four participants for the inaugural 1497 Writer's Lab focused on South Asian screenwriters. Fell-Holden was selected from a pool of 382 submissions by a committee of established writers and producers. Previously, alumna Shilpa Mankikar '09 was one of eleven finalists.

The 1497 Writers Lab is designed to elevate and develop screenplays by writers of South Asian descent. As a result, Fell-Holden will go through a 4-phased process consisting of Peer to Peer Workshops, Script Coaching and Development, Mentorship and Advisory Sessions, focused around his project, White Lies. The Script Coaching phase of the lab is led by Adjunct Associate Professor Adrienne Weiss. In the mentorship phase, Fell-Holden will be under the guidance of writer/director Maryam Keshavarz. 

White Lies tells the story of the lies of a charismatic but troubled teenager living in a coastal town beset with civil unrest who finds herself caught between a fractured community and the allure of a new Muslim student.

Toby Fell-Holden is a British writer-director based between New York and London. He is a Screen International Star of Tomorrow who graduated from Columbia’s film MFA in 2013 and holds a B.A. in philosophy, politics and economics from Oxford University. His last short Balcony, funded by Film London, won a Crystal Bear at Berlinale and gained a BIFA nomination for Best British short. Little Shadow, his thesis film, was long-listed for a BAFTA and nominated by the Casting Society of America (CSA) for an Artios. His shorts have played at over one hundred international festivals. He has written screenplays for major filmmakers and is also a script doctor. Fell-Holden was a Sundance screenwriting labs finalist and has received an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences fellowship. He is an alumni of the BFI NET.WORK development program and is a recipient of the John Brabourne award. 

The 1497 Writers Lab takes place from late August until mid November 2020.