Non-binary New Yorker Shon Keane writes edgy dark comedies and thought-provoking dramas about people learning to love and laugh while living with catastrophe.

 

Their short film “The Prom Queen,” a teen misfit dramedy, screened at festivals worldwide, was selected for the “Filmmakers of Tomorrow” program at the Telluride Film Festival and won the Graduate Film Award at the Hamptons Film Festival. Currently completing the feature documentary “Finding Bernie,” about the search for their gender non-conforming role model from the 1970s, Shon has written several award-winning feature screenplays including “Pansy,” a queer forbidden love story, which won the IFP Emerging Narrative Screenplay Award and the Atlanta Film Festival Screenplay Competition. They also co-wrote, with Melanie R.W. Oram, “She’s All Right,” which won Best Screenplay at The Imagine This Women’s Festival. The dramatic biopic is based on a memoir by Reverend Debra Hopkins, a Black Baptist minister and trans woman who was wrongfully arrested for a bank robbery and fought the corruption in the Alabama State Police to reclaim her life and her mental health. 

 

A graduate of the Columbia University Film Division, Shon is an Associate Professor of Media Arts at the City University of New York (BMCC) and a yoga and mindfulness instructor who in their spare time can be found in Central Park staring at trees or spinning like a whirling dervish.