Variety’s 10 Screenwriters to Watch for 2026 Include Scribes Behind ‘Being Heumann,’ ‘Clarissa’ and ‘A Different World’

The best movies and TV shows rest on one solid foundation: the script, and Variety has selected 10 of the up-and-coming scribes to celebrate in our Screenwriter to Watch class of 2026. The writers will be honored at a panel taking place at the Santa Fe Intl. Film Festival.

• Todd Bartels and Lou Howe (‘Tony’)

  

  “Tony,” about a pivotal summer for a young Anthony Bourdain — who would go on to become a celebrated chef, writer and TV producer/host — is the first feature that Bartels and Howe have had produced as a team, though their friendship dates back to high school. The duo first collaborated on “Dumb Blonde,” a script for a Dolly Parton origin story that made the Black List in 2022. “We knew we liked working together and liked writing a version of a biopic. So we started talking about who else interested us, and we’re both longtime Bourdain fans,” says Howe about the process of pitching “Tony.”

  “Our way of working when it comes to biopics was to find a window that serves as a microcosm for the larger journey, and for Dolly, it was her first eight years in Nashville when she becomes herself,” says Bartels.

  “Then we continued that with ‘Tony,’ finding even a shorter window, which was just this one summer in Provincetown [Mass.] when he stumbled into a job as a dishwasher in a clam shack and found his life’s calling,” Bartels explains.

  The “Tony” script was informed by some of their own experiences. “We both have spent a lot of time in New England and in kitchens,” Howe says. “My first job as a kid was washing dishes in a fish market on Nantucket, and Todd peeled vegetables in a fancy French restaurant in Connecticut.

  “So there’s something about the atmosphere that really spoke to us. And then we love origin stories. We love trying to figure out what makes these fascinating people that we admire and love — how they got that way and what are the seeds that are planted early on that grow into this adult,” says Howe.

  Howe and Bartels are now developing a richly varied slate of material: a biopic about a young Jackie Bouvier and her romance with John F. Kennedy; a project about the early days of MTV; an adaptation of the “Murder 101” podcast for Amazon with Jon Watts directing; plus the video game adaptation “Metal Gear Solid” for Sony.

  “It was surprising to me that the skill set and the process that we used for these very specific types of biopics, where they’re really zoomed in and trying to tell a whole life’s story through a microcosm of a shorter time period, that this process served us well in doing this giant action movie,” Howe says of working on “Metal Gear Solid.” —Pat Saperstein

  Reps Bartels and Howe; Agency: CAA;
  Management: Mosaic; Legal: Granderson Des Rochers

  Influences Robert Altman, Hal Ashby, Alexander Payne, Mike Leigh, Claire Denis

• Beth De Araújo (‘Josephine’)

  

  De Araújo came to film through sociology. She studied it at Berkeley, drawn in by poetry classes she took while nearly minoring in African American studies, and the discipline still shapes how she builds a character. “I think about society versus the individual,” says de Araújo, who earned an MFA at AFI. “What happened in society to this individual throughout their life that brings us to the opening scene?” A favorite maxim stays with her as she writes: “What people perceive to be real are real in their consequences.”

  Of Brazilian and Chinese descent, de Araújo describes herself as a rare “double minority” in the industry, and that in-betweenness is her subject. “I’m never enough of anything for anybody,” she says. “My home is with outsiders, with people who have been ostracized. Those are my people.”

  “Josephine” is a difficult film to summarize, and de Araújo knows it. Told through the subjective point of view of an 8-year-old girl, it opens with an act of violence witnessed through a child’s uncomprehending gaze. The POV was on the page from the first line. “It’s written that the camera is Josephine’s eyes,” she says, citing “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” and “Nickel Boys” as inspirational touchstones. “You have to make a two-dimensional space feel like a three-dimensional world, and the way to do that is to connect us to this singular experience. Can I transport people back to when they were 8 years old?”

  Next, she vows, something lighter will come. “I’m going to write something without a sexual assault,” she says. “I don’t want to be pigeonholed. If I could make a goddamn rom-com that was beautiful and classy, I’m here for it.” — Clayton Davis

  Reps Agency: WME; Legal: Frankfurt Kurnitz Klein & Selz

  Influences Martin McDonagh, Steve Zaillian, Nancy Oliver

• Chuko Esiri (‘Clarissa’)

  

  Esiri writes his first drafts longhand before he lets go. He and his brother, Arie, share directing duties, but the “Clarissa” screenplay is his alone, at least until the pages leave his desk. “Once I feel the script is ready to be shared widely, it’s no longer yours,” says Esiri, who hands early drafts to Arie for notes and welcomes more from producers and actors. “I’m not precious about the screenplay. I’ll take a good note from anybody.” He credits a directing teacher, Andrew McLean, with the philosophy he lives by. “The film is neutral. It doesn’t care about your ego,” he says. “What decision are you making, and is it the best one for the film?”

  When they set out to get educated for this business, the brothers split their training on purpose. Arie, a former camera trainee, wanted the academic rigor of Columbia; Esiri, already confident on the page, chose NYU’s Tisch for its hands-on approach. “NYU operates more like an atelier,” he says. “You get your hands on the camera in the first week.”

  “Clarissa” transplants Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” to Lagos, a swing Esiri knew would raise eyebrows. Rereading the novel after spending the pandemic with his mother, absorbing the stories of uncles and aunts, he found it startlingly familiar. Nigeria and Britain “share a colonial past,” he says, and with it a set of manners and mores. Also, Woolf and Toni Morrison sit on his personal Mount Rushmore of authors. The adaptation also allowed him and Arie to depict a romantic story spotlighting a middle- and upper-class Nigeria rarely seen abroad. “If the world ended today and aliens could only access its history through movies, they’d think Africa was always war-torn,” he says. “We wanted to widen the arpeggio.”

  Next, he and Arie are developing “Three Songs,” a music film for Film4, and “Innocent,” a whodunit drawn from a real theft in their family home, solved not by a detective but by a diviner. — Clayton Davis

  Reps Agency: UTA; Management: Brillstein Entertainment Partners

  Influences David Milch, Tony Gilroy, Robert Towne

• Aleshea Harris (‘Is God Is’)

  

  In 2014, Harris holed up in a North Hollywood apartment to write a radical play called “Is God Is” — a Southern Gothic tale about twin sisters who reunite with their mother, who thought they died in a fire. The sisters then set out on a quest for revenge against their father, who lit the match that blew up their lives.

  “I wasn’t even sure it would be performed,” Harris quips.

  But that’s exactly what happened: “Is God Is” premiered Off Broadway at Soho Rep in 2018 and the dark comedy/thriller became an instant sensation, earning Harris an Obie Award for playwriting. Even so, Harris didn’t expect to write and direct a big screen adaptation — starring Kara Young, Mallorie Johnson, Sterling K. Brown, Janelle Monáe and Vivica A. Fox — for a major movie studio, but that happened too.

  “‘Is God Is’ changed my life,” Harris says. “It changed my life as a play, and it’s done this other thing for my life as a movie. I’ll remember it as a piece that allowed, invited and reminded me to be bold, to be courageous, and to be really honest about what I wanted to see.”

  While writing the piece, Harris had to keep some distance from the more painful aspects of the material — the rage, a Black woman who’s considered ugly, a father’s betrayal — but she’s been struck by how deeply those themes have resonated with audiences.

  “There’s something quite intimate when people will DM me and say, ‘This is my story. This allowed me to have a catharsis,’” Harris says.

  In the process of adapting the project for the big screen, Harris teamed up with actor Tessa Thompson and “Zola” filmmakers Janicza Bravo and Jeremy O. Harris, who encouraged her to get behind the camera for her feature directorial debut. “The most important lesson was to believe in myself,” Harris says. “People see something in you that you maybe haven’t seen yet in yourself, and that could be incredibly useful.”

  Next summer, Harris will launch her newest work, an Off Broadway play titled “Feast of Rabbits,” which she’ll also direct. She’s also got a TV pilot in the works. — Angelique Jackson

  Reps Agency: WME; Legal: Hansen, Jacobson, Teller, Hoberman, Newman, Warren, Richman, Rush, Kaller, Gellman, Meigs & Fox

  Influences Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Caryl Churchill and the Coen Brothers.

• Rebekah Haussig (‘Being Heumann’)

  

  Taussig never set out to write a movie. A memoirist by training, she joined “Being Heumann” as a consultant on the film. Then she fell all the way in. “I got obsessed,” says Taussig, a disabled writer who turned up with books full of Post-it notes and character arcs until “CODA” filmmaker Siân Heder made the obvious call. “She was like, you know how to co-write this with me. And I was like, I do. I really do.”

  The film tells the story of disability rights icon Judy Heumann, and the assignment carried a private weight. Born four years before the Americans with Disabilities Act, she didn’t learn about the Heumann-led protests and sit-ins by activists in the 1970s to get Section 504 — a part of a 1973 act passed by Congress that prohibited discrimination against disabled people ­— signed until she was nearly 30. “Understanding how much silence there had been around that story made me feel an urgency,” she says. “Even if this movie never got made, this is one of the greatest honors I’ll have in my life.” She guarded her heart anyway, a reflex she developed from years of watching disability stories stall out. “I was prepared for it, right up until we were filming.”

  Taussig came to Heder’s attention through her memoir, “Sitting Pretty,” and her authority on the page is why the film breathes. Authenticity, she insists, was never a box to check. “It’s about understanding that that is how you make the story better, deeper, richer,” she says. That conviction runs straight through the film’s frankest choice, a love scene between a disabled woman and a non-disabled partner that she and Heder believe is among the first of its kind. “Disabled people have lots of sex. How have we not seen that?” she says. “Disability is both everything and inconsequential. It shapes everything, and also it doesn’t matter.”

  She’s the last person she swears should be handing out advice to aspiring writers. But she tries anyway. “Follow the thing that makes your eyes light up,” she says. “If it makes you feel alive, take a deep breath and dive in.” — Clayton Davis

  Reps Management: Untitled

  Influences Lauren Slater, Bridget Everett

• Zoe Kazan (‘East of Eden’)

  

  While she may be best known as an award-winning actor, Kazan has been writing for years. She began early on, knowing that as an actor, there could be too much downtime. “Plus, to be completely frank, the opportunities for women my age who are actors are just not as good as it should be, and I don’t want to spend my life being away from my children and doing work that I find not worth my time,” she says.

  For the first time, Kazan is writing a TV show, showrunning Netflix’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden.” And she has a personal connection to it — her grandfather Elia Kazan directed the 1955 film adaptation. But for her, there was too much story to tell for just another film.

  “The book is so massive,” she says, knowing it better served a limited series. “The point of the narrative is this reiteration through different generations of the same themes, and how change is possible. The intergenerational aspect of this felt like this is a very special opportunity.”

  As a new parent — her oldest child was 18 months old when she began writing — she related deeply to certain storylines, specifically the way Lee (portrayed beautifully by Hoon Lee) stepped up raising two young children. “I felt this real kinship with this person on whom parenthood is kind of accidentally thrust, and then he ends up making a choice to own that role and step into it more fully and make that his life,” she says.

  When asked about her process as a writer, Kazan can’t help but laugh and admit that any process she had was thrown out after becoming a parent. “I used to write in these marathon sessions where I would barely breathe for a couple weeks,” she says. “The pandemic hit, I didn’t have any childcare for that first year. My partner and I were trading a few hours every afternoon so that each of us would have time to write. Now I’m extremely adaptable. Sure, I can write at the dining room table with my one child breastfeeding on me and another child screaming under the table.” —Emily Longeretta

  Reps Relevant; Agency: UTA; Legal: Jackoway Austen Tyerman Wertheimer Mandelbaum Morris Bernstein Trattner Auerbach Hynick Jaime LeVine Sample & Klein

  Influences Ethan Hawke

• Kelly O’Sullivan (‘Mouse’)

  

  All three of O’Sullivan’s films — “Saint Frances” (2020), “Ghostlight” (2024) and this year’s “Mouse” — meditate on “intergenerational conversations,” she says. “What does it mean to age? How does that change you? I’m looking at things from both a childlike perspective and a parental perspective.”

  “Mouse,” which she co-directed with her partner Alex Thompson from a script she wrote solo, is a coming-of-age drama about a friendship that’s equal parts healing and concerning. High school senior Minnie (Katherine Mallen Kupferer) draws close to Helen (Sophie Okonedo), the mother of her best friend, Callie (Chloe Coleman), after Callie’s tragic death in a car accident. O’Sullivan and Thompson now have two young children, but the “Mouse” script was finished before they became parents. “I was writing from a hypothetical place, but having my own kid made it all the more harrowing and personal,” she says. “And then my mom died in the middle of us making this movie.”

  That sudden loss was an instance of life imitating art that reminded O’Sullivan of what drives her writing in the first place. “I turned back to ‘Lady Bird’ and ‘Manchester by the Sea’ because those characters have both a push and a pull to their hometowns,” she says. “I love their interest in, quote-unquote, unremarkable people and places.” She shot “Mouse” in Little Rock, Ark., where she grew up.

  It’s the acute attention she gives to people like her mother, whose personality inspired much of the dialogue in “Mouse,” that turns O’Sullivan’s observations of everyday scenarios into full-fledged, award-winning films. “I’m drawn to people and the messiness between them, and how we both help and hurt the people closest to us,” she says. “We can be so generous and so loving, and then also so cruel.” —Selome Hailu

  Reps Agency: Gersh; Legal: Ginsburg Daniels Kallis; Management: Fusion Entertainment

  Influences Greta Gerwig, Kenneth Lonergan

• Felicia Pride (‘A Different World’)

  

  It’s somewhat meta that Pride was tapped to reboot the college comedy “A Different World” for Netflix, as the NAACP Image Award nominee is the daughter of an educator and taught at the college level before she pivoted to a career in entertainment.

  “Before I came to Hollywood 11 years ago, I was an impact producer,” Pride says, explaining the fancy term for the other way in which she used her marketing degree. “I would help social justice projects reach their audiences and achieve their impact goals.”

  Now she’s the creator, showrunner and executive producer of the streamer’s 10-episode sequel series. In making the show, Pride worked with Netflix to get real HBCU students involved.

  “I created an HBCU Council that the writers’ room conferred with to hear about their experiences,” Pride says. The production also filmed on campus at Clark Atlanta University, Spelman and Morehouse. “Fifty-nine percent of our background is HBCU students, and these young people knew the assignment. The authenticity was really important.”

  Equally important was capturing the spirit of the original 1987 series, which Pride grew up watching. “It’s one of my favorite shows, and it had such an impact on my coming of age,” she says, admitting she was a little nervous to take on this task. “It was so sacred to me and millions of people. I did not want to be responsible for messing that up. But on the other end, I was honored.”

  Pride had already earned the confidence of and built a rapport with Debbie Allen (the creative force behind 1987’s “A Different World”) through “Grey’s Anatomy” — Allen as one of the stars, Pride in the writers’ room. Plus, Pride had sharpened her skills by working as a staff writer and story editor on “Queen Sugar,” then as a writer and co-executive producer on “Bel-Air.”

  “I’m grateful to have had the experience of being able to understand how to reimagine a classic show — how to pay homage but also deliver a show that can stand on its own.”

  Up next, Pride has several TV and film projects in various stages of development via her Honey Chile production banner, created to illuminate the lives of Black women over 40. She also has plans to direct. “I just want to keep telling stories that illuminate the fullness of Black life,” Pride says. “That’s really my mission. And that’s what I love about ‘A Different World’: it’s intergenerational.” —Angelique Jackson

  Reps Agency: UTA; Management: Industry Entertainment; Legal: Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz

  Influences Toni Morrison, Terry McMillan and Mara Brock Akil

• Diana Reid (‘Sense and Sensibility’)

  

  Reid was familiar with Jane Austen’s classic “Sense and Sensibility”; she was also familiar with Ang Lee’s 1995 adaptation, and when her producer suggested she adapt Austen’s classic, Reid admits she was “wary because I thought it had been done perfectly.” But she read the book and rewatched the film, ultimately feeling there was something that hadn’t yet been said and that she had something
  to contribute.

  For Reid, “The real spine of the narrative and the crux of the story was about the relationship between those two sisters.” That focus anchors her screenplay, with the central love story being the bond between Marianne (Esme Creed-Miles) and Elinor (Daisy Edgar-Jones). “It follows less the conventional romance arc, and more of a coming-of-age story about how two sisters learn from each other,” Reid says. “Once they’ve adopted some of each other’s qualities and learned from one another, they can then be with men who they deserve to be with.”

  She adds, “It’s almost like the men are the best rewards they get for going on this journey together.”

  Reid’s screenplay remains authentic to the period and yet remarkably modern and fresh, injected with plenty of wit. “From the outset, when I pitched it, I’ve always said that the language was going to be either lifted from the book or that I would do my best to imitate the voice of the book,” she says, adding, “For me, it was about highlighting the parts of the book that had contemporary resonance, the moments where the characters behaved in ways that felt relatable. The way Willoughby treats Marianne was a great example — that dynamic is completely unchanged from the book.”

  And the secret to adapting the novel? Reid says, “It was a combination of being strict with the language while taking liberties with the substance of the story where necessary.”—Jazz Tangcay

  Reps Curtis Brown (U.K.)

  Influences Martin Scorsese’s “The Age of Innocence,” Merchant Ivory films, Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”

• Elliot Tuttle (‘Blue Film’)

  

  At the climax of writer-director Tuttle’s “Blue Film,” an elderly man says to the sex worker he’s hired that they’ve made memories of each other, and, “I’m going to take mine of you with me.” It’s an odd, spiky line: Lana Del Rey sings it in the song “The Grants.”

  “She is America’s preeminent chronicler of everyday sexuality,” Tuttle says. “She’s one of our best writers working right now, across mediums.”

  The Del Rey ethos — achingly sensual and attuned to the oddity of desire — infuses “Blue Film,” released this year by Obscured Releasing. As the film begins, a masked man (Reed Birney) hires on-camera performer Aaron Eagle (Kieron Moore) to spend the night with him; eventually, we learn that the two share a history as pederast teacher and withdrawn student, and that Hank, the older man, is fulfilling a decades-long fantasy.

  The screenplay walks a tonal tightrope, but lands in a place of heartfelt empathy for both leads. “I hope to trust the audience, that they’re engaging with what I’m writing in good faith,” Tuttle says. “I hopefully don’t need to explain these characters’ shortcomings.” Instead, he focused on making their circumstances feel authentic. “I would go down YouTube rabbit holes and watch hours of interviews with convicted sex offenders. I had to find the groove of the character — you have to know enough about them so that when you’re writing, you know how they would move through a space.”

  An Occidental College graduate and newly minted New York resident, Tuttle got his start as an intern for the Duplass brothers, writing script coverage. He’s just completed a new script — “an ensemble end-of-the-world film about what it feels like to be an artist right now.” It’s a thriller, unlike the intimate “Blue Film.” That swerve suits Tuttle fine. “I would never,” he says, “want to repeat myself.”
  —Daniel D’Addario

  Reps Management: Fusion Entertainment

  Influences Catherine Breillat, Lars von Trier, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jacques Rivette