Trey Ellis
Trey Ellis is a two-time Emmy and Peabody winning filmmaker, American Book Award winning novelist, NAACP Image award winning playwright, essayist and Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Most recently, he is a writer and Consulting Producer on Costiera, a TV comedy/action series for Amazon starring Jesse Williams. He was an Executive Producer and Interviewer for the Emmy-winning HBO documentaries True Justice: Bryan Stevenson's Fight for Equality and King in the Wilderness. His screenplay Holy Mackerel! is one of the highest ever rated on Franklin Leonard’s Black List.com. He is currently developing this project as a limited series with Shaka King and starring Samuel L. Jackson and Wendell Pierce. Some of his other screenplays include the Peabody Award-winning The Tuskegee Airmen for HBO and Good Fences for Showtime, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was shortlisted for the PEN award for Best Teleplay. In 2020, he created the ongoing online course “Screenwriting: Core Elements” for the Sundance Film Institute, described as “profoundly influential” and continues to be taken by hundreds of students around the world. His works have been screened at the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. He is the author of the novels, Platitudes, Home Repairs, and Right Here, Right Now, as well as the memoir Bedtime Stories: Adventures in the Land of Single-Fatherhood. His essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, GQ, and Vanity Fair, and he has contributed audio commentary to NPR’s All Things Considered. His play, Fly, was commissioned by the Lincoln Center Institute and continues to be performed around the country including Washington, D.C.’s Ford’s Theater, the Pasadena Playhouse and the New Victory Theater in New York. He is currently in rehearsals for a musical on the life of Dorothy Dandridge for which he wrote the book and is co-writer of the lyrics. A night of the music from the musical was performed at Carnegie Hall.
Professor Trey Ellis is the author of “The Long Way Around,” a new fiction podcast that will premiere this fall.
True Justice: Bryan Stevenson’s Fight for Equality, the new documentary by Professor Trey Ellis won an Emmy at the 41st News & Documentary Emmy Awards last night.
True Justice: Bryan Stevenson’s Fight for Equality, the new documentary by Professor of Professional Practice Trey Ellis just won a Peabody Award.
King in the Wilderness, an HBO documentary produced by Professor Trey Ellis about the last three days of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s life, took home the Emmy for Outstanding Historical Documentary last night.
April 4th, 2018 was a historic day, as it marked the 50th anniversary of the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
Fly written by Associate Professor Trey Ellis and co-writen by Ricardo Kahn received three awards at The NAACP Theatre Awards, including Best Production.
The play tells the story of four members of the Tuskegee Airmen, who during World War II became the first African-American military aviators in United States history.