Neurodiversity Celebration Panel

Roadmap Writers is a talent training and discovery platform for screenwriters ready for a guided path to success. Our programs are hosted by working industry executives and are designed to empower writers with actionable tools and insights to elevate your craft and cultivate relationships with industry professionals. Since 2016, we have helped hundreds of writers from all over the world sign to representation, staff on series, and option and produce their projects. Our writers have been staffed on BRIDGERTON, THE FLASH, CHICAGO PD, THE FIRST LADY, NIGHT COURT, THE GOOD DOCTOR, THE RESIDENT, REACHER, SUBJECT TO CHANGE, MAYANS and POKERFACE. Writers have sold, set up and been produced by Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, MGM, American High, New Republic Pictures, Maven Screen Media, Lifetime, Will Packer Studios and Roku. 

Kaia Alexander is an award-winning novelist (Written in the Ashes, Mockingbird in Mark Twain’s Hat), director, and entrepreneur. She was a development executive on the feature films JUST FRIENDS, PEACEFUL WARRIOR and THE GOOD NIGHT. Kaia runs a global screenwriting group for women called Writing with Kaia, and she’s the founder of the new Entertainment Business School. Her mentors are author Tom Robbins, and late comedian Garry Shandling. She’s proud to be the BQ in LGBTQ.

Matt Foss is an Autistic writer who writes original stories and adapts a wide range of IP for stage and screen. 

He grew up on a cotton farm in West Texas, worked as a wildlife biologist in Montana before transitioning to working as a professional actor and playwright in Chicago and trained and performed at Russia’s famous Moscow Art Theatre.  He has an MFA and PhD in theatre.

In 2023, the Austin Film Festival and Movie Maker Magazine named him on of the Top 25 Screenwriters to Watch and on Final Draft/Coverfly’s Best Unrepresented Writers List. He’s an AFF finalist, a Nicholls Quarterfinalist and a finalist in both the Final Draft/Big Break and Page Awards Screenplay Contests.  

He is a recipient of the Kennedy Center’s David Mark Cohen National Playwriting Award and his adaptations and productions have won multiple Joseph Jefferson Awards-Chicago’s top theatre prize.

His comedy feature, LONE WOLVES, directed by Ryan Cunningham (INSIDE AMY SCHUMER, BROAD CITY) will premiere in 2024. (TRAILER)

He is a member of the WGA-East, repped by Tom Carter at Artillery Creative and a proud graduate of SPACE CAMP at the U.S. Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. He was twelve and it was amazing.

Stacey Russell has been writing since she was a kid, putting on plays with her My Little Ponies and DuckTale plushies and charging her family a quarter per show to witness her brilliance. Unfortunately, her parents have many of these on video.

Stacey writes heavy but quirky character driven stories about outsiders, misfits, and sometimes just all around spectacular failures. A late diagnosis of AuDHD and raising a child with Down syndrome, she uses her writing to advocate for those who are deemed "unworthy" as they battle to rise above expectations - both society's and their own.

Zander is a former Pixar Technical Director, and the writer / director of the hit fiction podcast series CELERITAS which won at the Austin Film Festival and was nominated for a Webby. He mostly writes genre features filled with people who need as much therapy as he does, facing their worst fears in deeply researched, unforgiving worlds.

Now based in Austin, TX, he was regularly pulled out of grade school to hitchhike through developing countries, get hypothermia on Mount Everest, drink cow blood, and witness the occasional public cremation. From a young age he was drawn to genre fiction, which felt more familiar than the Americans around him. Now a father of two, his writing attempts to channel the fear and awe of his childhood, and the broken decision-making of adults who were raised in chaos.