Starz #TakeTheLead Writers’ Intensive Fellows
Francis Fuster Francis Fuster is an NYC Queens-born native, and while (on paper) she sounds like a white, Jewish man, she’s, in fact, Afro-Latina. A former sketch comedy writer at the Magnet Theater and a contributing writer for the satirical women’s magazine Reductress, her comedy is bold and surreal meets magical realism. She’s worked on shows such as Gordita Chronicles, The Upshaws and most recently, The Lincoln Lawyer. This year, Francis was a quarter-finalist for the Black Boy Writes & Black Girl Writes Mentorship Initiative.
Emily Orr
Emily Orr is a Black comedy writer from the Deep South, now based in Los Angeles. She was most recently staffed on Wizards Beyond Waverly Place for Disney. A Harvard College graduate, Emily wrote for The Harvard Lampoon and Hasty Pudding Theatricals, and earned the Franklin Ford Award for “strong intellectual ability and dry wit,” as well as the Kwame Anthony Appiah Prize for the most outstanding senior thesis relating to the African diaspora. Her academic and comedic writing both ask the same questions: How do we become who we are, and how weird can it get?
Before jumping into television, she created digital media for the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., producing videos about 200-year-old Italian sculpting techniques, DIY Van Gogh makeup looks, and why art history is more alive (and chaotic) than you think. Emily’s original work blends absurd comedy, colorful world-building, and cultural critique, often centering outsiders who are trying—and failing—in deeply funny ways, to understand themselves and each other.
Lia Romeo Lia Romeo is a queer playwright, novelist, essayist, and screenwriter who grew up in Colorado and has somehow managed to spend her entire adult life in New Jersey (not the plan). She writes funny stories about sad things. She is especially drawn to stories about women in transition, who are questioning the rules they’ve always lived by and figuring out how to make their own. She is a recent graduate of the Juilliard playwriting program and holds an undergraduate degree from Princeton. In 2025, she was nominated for the Outer Critics’ Circle award for Best New American Play. Her plays have been produced off-Broadway in NYC and regionally around the country, as well as internationally in Paris and Edinburgh. She is the author of a novel, Dating the Devil (BelleBooks), and a humor book, 11,002 Things to Be Miserable About (Abrams Image), and her essays have been published in the Washington Post, Newsweek, the Huffington Post, and other major national publications. She teaches in the graduate creative writing program at Fairleigh Dickinson University. She is a cancer survivor and the mother of a six-year-old son.
Laura Santoro
Laura Santoro, originally from San Dimas, CA, is a TV writer whose dark comedies take aim at social taboos, messy families, and the absurdities that come with both. Raised on a thoroughbred horse farm in Southern California, she learned early on that nothing has more drama than a racetrack—except the people who raised her. The daughter of a Mexican mother and an Italian-American father, her biracial background drives her storytelling, focusing on identity, disability, and the Latine experience. Laura has written two episodes of television for Netflix’s Gabby’s Dollhouse and has worked as a Writers’ Assistant or Script Coordinator on Bad Robot’s Duster (HBO Max), Lopez vs Lopez (NBC), Shining Vale (Starz), Best Foot Forward (Apple TV+), and Turner & Hooch (Disney+). She is a ScreenCraft TV Comedy Quarterfinalist, WeScreenplay Diverse Voices Lab Quarterfinalist, and an Austin Film Festival Second Rounder. For over five years, she was a top-ranked singles tennis player in California for the United States Tennis Association.