Master Class on Producing and Writing for Television: Alexa Junge

 

Come learn from Alexa Junge, a Barnard Alumna ’85, and accomplished showrunner, screenwriter, T.V. writer and producer whose credits include Friends, The West Wing, and Grace & Frankie.

This conversation will be moderated by Ken LaZebnik

Alexa Junge attended Barnard College, where she co-wrote The Varsity Show. After receiving her MFA in NYU’s Dramatic Writing program, Junge wrote for Friends from 1994 to 1999. Her episode, The One Where Everybody Finds Out, earned her an Emmy nomination for Best Writing for a Comedy Series. Other television work includes: Grace and Frankie, The Party, Best Friends Forever, The United States of Tara, The West Wing, and Sex and the City. As a screenwriter, her film work includes: Rapunzel Unbraided, Lilo & Stitch 2 and Mulan II (with Jeanine Tesori). Ms. Junge’s plays have been produced at Goodspeed Opera House, Studio Arena Theater, Playwrights Horizons’ Lab, and The Depot Theater. Her work has been developed at The Hedgebrook Women Playwrights Festival, The Public Theater Lab/Ars Nova, MacDowell Colony, Djerassi Resident Artists Program. She is a writer-contributor to NPR’s This American Life and was a performer on TAL’s What I Learned from Television tour. Alexa is co-creating a fictional podcast for This American Life and developing pilots for Anonymous Content and Starz. Her play Fingersmith was produced at The Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2016 and The American Repertory Theater in 2017, and is headed to New York next fall.

Moderator
Ken LaZebnik writes for television, film, and the theatre. He shares story credit with Garrison Keillor for director Robert Altman’s film, A Prairie Home Companion, and wrote Thomas Kinkade’s Christmas Cottage. He has written for television for twenty-five years, including seven years as a writer/producer for Touched by An Angel. He also has written for Army Wives, Providence, Star Trek: Enterprise, and the series When Calls The Heart. Three of his fourteen plays have focused on autism, including On The Spectrum, which was awarded a Steinberg Citation from the American Theatre Critics Association. Theory of Mind, commissioned by Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, has been performed in throughout the country. He collaborates with The Mixed Blood Theatre in Minneapolis, and is the Director of the Stephens College Low-Residency M.F.A. in Television and Screenwriting, which aims to increase the number of women writing for film and TV. He can be reached at klazebnik@stephens.edu.

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