Your Personal Themes w/ CineStory

The CineStory Foundation (www.cinestory.org) is a non-profit educational association dedicated to providing emerging screenwriters with opportunities to work with committed industry professionals on a personal basis through mentorship and writers retreats.

CineStory Feature Fellowship winners receive approximately $20,000 in cash and prizes, including $10,000 cash award, while the TV Fellowship winners receive approximately $9,000 in cash and prizes, including $1,000 cash prize. Fellowship Winners also get one-year mentorship with two working industry professionals, as well as a fully funded spot at the annual retreats.

CineStory Retreats take place over four days in Idyllwild, California. Attendees workshop scripts during three 90 minute one-on-one sessions with CineStory mentors and participate in numerous mentor panels about craft and how the industry works.

Lisanne Sartor gained early notoriety for:
1. Calling her fourth-grade teacher a female chauvinist for not letting girls play kickball
2. Teaching sex-ed seminars to her fifth-grade cohorts using Judy Blum’s FOREVER
3. Calling her eighth-grade teacher a bitch for unfairly penalizing another student
(While Sartor’s principal shared her opinion, he told her she should keep such opinions to herself. Lesson not learned).

Sartor’s outspokenness led her to become a Los Angeles DGA assistant director. After seven years, she had a bad back, nerve damage in her feet, and a Biblical appreciation for caffeine. She quit to write and direct. Since then, she’s worked with numerous production companies, received a UCLA Screenwriting MFA, and participated in the AFI Directing Workshop for Women, the WGA Feature Writers Access Project, and the AFI/Fox Bridge Program.

She is an alumna of Yaddo, Hedgebrook, Gullkistan and Storyknife residencies. She’s taught screenwriting at UCLA, Stephens College, the Disney Launchpad Shorts Incubator, and the AFI Directing Workshop for Women. She has been the Board President for the screenwriting educational non-profit, the CineStory Foundation, since 2009, and a board member since 2004. She’s written thirty + screenplays, penned a Lifetime MOW, and directed five successful short films. All her projects are drawn from her family history of secrets and lies and her vengeful, loyal nature. She’s never looked back.

Colette Sartor (https://colettesartor.com) grew up a nice, New Jersey Italian girl looking to
escape the trajectory expected from nice, New Jersey Italian girls: marriage, three-kid minimum, Sunday mass followed by a sit-down dinner for the entire extended family that she alone would cook, serve, and clean up. After fleeing to Los Angeles to be an entertainment lawyer, she found herself disappointed by the Southern California beaches (not nearly as pretty as the Jersey shore) and by lawyering (which sucked), so she quit her job after a few years (okay, eight) and started writing fiction.

Colette’s linked short story collection ONCE REMOVED (University of Georgia Press) won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, among other awards. Her work has appeared in THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE, KENYON REVIEW ONLINE, CARVE MAGAZINE, THE RUMPUS, PRAIRIE SCHOONER, COLORADO REVIEW, HARVARD REVIEW, and elsewhere, and has received a Writers@Work Fiction Prize, a Fugue Prose Award, a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, a Reynolds Price Short Fiction Award, and a Truman Capote fellowship from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she completed her MFA.

Colette has taught writing for 20 years and currently teaches at UCLA Extension Writers’ Program as well as privately. In addition, she is the Executive Director of The CineStory Foundation (https://cinestory.org), a nonprofit mentoring organization for emerging TV writers and screenwriters. She still lives in Los Angeles with her husband, son, and large German Shepherd Dog who has yet to master the concept of boundaries, and she never wants to practice law again.