About Kelsey

Kelsey is a director and screenwriter based in the Chicago area. A graduate of the Second City Film School, she specializes in improvised filmmaking and episodic/short-form comedy.

areas of focus

Her primary writing and directing interests include:

• Queer-feminist comedy adaptations of texts in the public domain (especially Shakespeare).

• Narratives centered around female characters over the age of 45.

• Using improv/devising work with actors to generate and revise film, TV, and web series scripts. Her process is inspired by the work of Mike Leigh and based on her training in Meisner technique and Second City improvisation. The primary emphasis is on the potential for actors to shape each other’s characters in unexpected ways.

• Screenwriting as a form of scholarly inquiry.

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current projects

• Kelsey’s web series pilot script Menopause Hamlet envisions Hamlet as a fiftysomething woman, exploring how the play’s central questions about human behavior can be shifted to represent a character’s experience of menopause.

• She is also at work on a feature script inspired by her experiences writing a dissertation chapter about Tennessee Williams’ revision of Summer & Smoke. As part of the brainstorming and writing process for this project, she is developing a catalog of improvisational and devising tools to be used with actors to shape the character development in the script.

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teaching

Kelsey is also an educator and freelance screenwriting consultant. Before moving to Chicago, she was an instructor and instructional designer at Boston College. She now teaches writing classes at The Second City.