Lisanne Sartor
Board President
Creative Director, Mentorship
Lisanne Sartor is an award-winning writer/director whose short film SIX LETTER WORD has screened at over fifty-five film festivals worldwide, including the Telluride Film Festival. She made that short via the AFI Directing Workshop for Women. She was awarded a renowned Hedgebrook Writers Residency in 2016 and was a 2016 WGA Feature Writers Access Project Honoree. In 2017, she was one of twenty-five women chosen for the first year of the exclusive AFI/Fox Bridge Program, designed to increase the number of women working on studio films.
Colette Sartor
Executive Director
Colette Sartor an award-winning writer whose linked short story collection ONCE REMOVED (University of Georgia Press) won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, IAN Best Book of the Year Award for Short Story Collections, and the Juror’s Choice Award and the Short Stories Award from the National Indie Excellence Awards, among other awards. Her stories and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE, KENYON REVIEW ONLINE, CARVE MAGAZINE, SLICE MAGAZINE, PRAIRIE SCHOONER, and COLORADO REVIEW.
Leah Estrin
Creative Director, TV Contests & Retreats
Leah Estrin was born & raised in Los Angeles & Orange County making her very much a So-Cal Kid. Ironically, she is not a fan of the beach. She remembers when The Farmer’s Market was just a market, The Fairfax District was not hipster place but where her grandmother went for the bakery, that the area where California Adventure was built was the parking lot for Disneyland and when Orange County had orange groves.
Her first job was teaching young kids dance. After getting a BFA in Film Production from Chapman University and an MFA from UCLA’s Producing Program, Leah started her career at Imagine Entertainment. During her 10 years at Imagine, she moved up the ranks from assistant to story editor to creative executive. While at Imagine, she worked on multiple projects including INSIDE MAN, FUN WITH DICK & JANE, TOWER HEIST, UNDERCOVER BROTHER and INSIDE DEEP THROAT.
Rajiv Reddy
Creative Director, Feature Contests & Retreats
Associate Executive Director
Rajiv Reddy is a filmmaker and a UCLA Professional Program in Screenwriting graduate. His first feature film, ILAI (2013), was featured at several international film festivals including the Mumbai Film Festival and the London Indian Film Festival.
Pamela Pierce
Founder & Executive Director Emeritus
Pamela Pierce is the founder of the CineStory Retreat and Fellowship Awards. She received her MA from Stanford in screenwriting and is a Pre-Academy Nicholl Fellow. She is the former director of the Austin Film Festival Conference and Screenwriting Competition. In addition, she has done business affairs with CBS Entertainment and has taught screenwriting for Northwestern University, Columbia College Chicago, and University of Chicago Graham School.
Mark Evans
Tech & Admin Coordinator
Mark Evans was born into an uber-fundamentalist sect of Scientology and sovereign-citizen household, and as a result raised in an extremely isolated environment. Because of that (along with being taken out of school in the first grade), he’s been working full time since the age of thirteen and has been self taught in computer science, IT, even electrical engineering. But movies were an escape, or better, a sanctuary from the over-bearing indoctrination attempting to “mold” him into an “ethical” person.
Mark always had an interest in storytelling and created stories and characters from a young age, dropped it for “real life,” took an interest in screenwriting, dropped it for “work and study.”
Jen Nuzzo
Digital Marketing Coordinator
Jen Nuzzo is a UCLA Professional Program in Screenwriting graduate and award-winning journalist.
She started working with CineStory in 2018 and is also an associate member of Women in Film.
Adhish Yajnik
Alumni Residencies Coordinator
Adhish Yajnik is an Indian-American writer, visual effects supervisor, and the Technical Director of CG and Compositing at Alpha Studios, a Burbank visual effects company. His work has appeared in shows like Modern Family, Grey’s Anatomy, and American Born Chinese. He graduated from the USC School of Cinematic Arts in 2012 and he completed the UCLA Professional Program in Screenwriting in 2015.
His screenplays have appeared on the Blacklist’s Realtime Top List, ranked in the top seven percent of entries in the Academy Nicholl Fellowships, and have been nominated for UCLA’s Nate Wilson Joie De Vivre Award in Screenwriting. He attended the 2015 CineStory Feature Retreat and the 2017 retreat as a semifinalist, and began volunteering for CineStory in 2021. His feature screenplay, INCONVENIENCED, was a quarterfinalist in the 2024 feature contest.
Jimmy Miller
Brand Coordinator
Jimmy Miller is a television editor and screenwriter from a small town in northeastern Ohio. He studied print and newspaper design at Ohio State University and worked as a web and graphic designer for clients such as NPR, Discovery Channel, and IntraActive before earning his Master’s in Film from American University in Washington, DC.
Part of the first generation of computer-based editors, Jimmy has worked on shows for nearly every major network and cable channel during his 25+ year career. However, screenwriting was always his first love – and being raised by a single mother and two older sisters gave him a genuine interest in telling well-crafted female-driven stories that break the Hollywood mold.
Kimon Koufogiannis
Outreach Coordinator
Kimon Koufogiannis was born in Greece, went to school in London, came of age in NYC, and finally moved to LA where he always wanted to settle down – just before the pandemic hit.
Along the way, he garnered BAs in Theater Studies and Art History and went to actual drama school at The London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts (and for a year at the Conservatoire in Paris).
Shawn Nuzzo
Audiovisual Coordinator
Shawn Nuzzo tries to makes art with his friends.
Nuzzo is a former engineer, firefighter, civic president, punk rock singer, assistant film editor, pseudo-intellectual and long-distance bicyclist.
By day, Nuzzo was a dependable assistant film editor working on a string of largely forgotten films, including: BLAIR WITCH 2, SWIMFAN, IT RUNS IN THE FAMILY and MR. 3000.