What It's Like to Pitch to the Biggest Companies in Television

On this virtual workshop, hear from the 2024 Moonshot Pilot Accelerator fellows about what it was like participating in the program and pitching to TV's biggest companies, like HBO, Netflix, Hulu, Showtime, Starz, Amazon Studios, and more!

• What happens in a pitch meeting, and how do you prepare to pitch your project to companies like HBO, Netflix, Hulu, Showtime, Warner Bros. and more?

• How do you grip a reader from the first pages of your pilot script and stand out against hundreds of submissions for a fellowship?

• How can you leverage general meetings into a long-term career?

• What's the best way to follow up with execs after a meeting and develop lasting connections?

  
  

We'll discuss these topics and more during this special virtual panel with the fellows from our 2024 Moonshot Pilot Accelerator.

We're hosting this virtual panel in May because our 2026 Moonshot Pilot Accelerator applications run from Wednesday, April 1, through Wednesday, May 27! If you're considering applying, use this panel as an opportunity to learn more.

We also invite you to attend our free Info Session about the Moonshot Pilot Accelerator on Monday, April 20, featuring Moonshot co-founders Katrina Medoff and Tracy Sayre.

Meet the fellows:

• Lex Powell (they/them) is a Queer multi-hyphenate Overachiever — the Writer-Performer-Director-Comedian-Musician type — based in NY. They are the creator and host of the In Character series, and the award-winning director of the Hearsay & Hyperbole performance ensemble. Their work has been performed globally from beer-soaked basement stages to acclaimed museums. Raised by television, they are excited to finally find a use for their under-appreciated ability to predict TV plots by writing their own.

• Kris Crenwelge has lived in eight different countries, worked with 20+ sports teams, and a coworker once put a curse on her because she wanted her job. A fellow in the 2022 Disney Writing Program and the 2023 Native American Showrunner Program, Kris was a staff writer on TRUE LIES (CBS) and SPIRIT RANGERS (Netflix), nominated for seven Children’s & Family Emmys. These days, Kris lives curse-free in L.A. with her husband and rescue pup.

• Originally from Kansas City, Missouri, Dani Milton loves writing about Black women in impossible situations. While juggling a corporate accounting career, Dani’s scripts have been honored by the Academy Nicholl Fellowships, the Athena Film Festival Writers Lab and other competitions. Dani was a 2022 Hedgebrook Writer in Residence and in 2023, Dani produced and directed The First Martian, based on her reproductive rights sci-fi short script. It is currently in post-production.

• Ama Anane writes scripts, standup, poetry, and to-do lists. She’s writing two television pilots about Black women navigating motherhood and inconvenient love. Her scripts are shaped by Ama’s experience running classrooms in prisons and public schools; running a nonprofit; and running after her kids. She lives and loves in LA with her wife. A graduate of Emerson College and Columbia University, Ama’s creative and community work reflect her desire to understand and share human experiences.

• With an arsenal of produced MOWs and contest-winning pilots under her belt, Andrea Shawcross is a woman obsessed with writing thrillers about obsessed women. Haunted by a dark past in ice cold Winnipeg, Canada, Shawcross left it all for the blazing sun of Venice, CA where she churns out nail-biting scripts by day, and devours mystery novels by night .

• Philippines-born and California-bred, Justine Grace Ceniza Rivero writes sci-fi/fantasy about strong women of color breaking free from societal expectations to discover their (often fantastical or futuristic) powers. Previously, Justine was an investigative journalist and technologist. Now, she hopes to be the first Filipina-American showrunner. She’s a 2024 Fellow for ISA Fast Track and Stowe Story Labs, and placed in Moonshot Initiative Pilot Accelerator, Emerging Screenwriters Competition, Big Apple Film Festival, and Netflix Screenwriters’ Fellowship.

• Batoul Mourad is an award-winning screenwriter from New York City. She placed in the WILDSound Film Festival, where she had her project table read by professional actors and appeared as a guest on their podcast. She is also a 2024 fellow with Sesame Workshop Writers’ Room. Having studied history education and film at NYU, Batoul is interested in the ways that the venn diagram of comedy and history intersect and she looks to build a cinematic universe of TV and film within that overlapping space.

• Alex Friedman is an LA-based comedy writer who grew up in Cobb County, Georgia, where the school district once put "evolution is a theory, not a fact" stickers in the biology textbooks. She writes female-driven half-hours about anxious Jewish women and 1600s Italian murderesses – so, autobiographical. She's worked for CNN, ABC News, and Late Night with Seth Meyers, and has developed an original project with Broadway Video. She is repped by AGI Entertainment Media & Management.