The Pasifika Entertainment Advancement Komiti (PEAK) has announced its inaugural PEAK Writers Fellowship class, supported by Netflix. This fellowship will discover and nurture six emerging Pasifika writers, looking to launch their careers in television. The PEAK Writers Fellowship is founded by PEAK co-founder, director, screenwriters and showrunner, Dana Ledoux Miller, making it the only writing program in Hollywood created by a Pasifika creative.
This program is designed to help early career writers land their first staff writing role by pairing each fellow with a high-level industry mentor to help transform their original scripts into professional-level writing samples. Additionally, the fellows will participate in panels and discussions with top television and film industry professionals to equip them with practical and business knowledge needed to succeed in the entertainment industry as writers.
The 2024 PEAK Writers Fellowship class includes:
- Davis Kop
- Mise En Place – Inspired by the events of Bon Appetit and their YouTube channel, “Mise en Place” is an ensemble comedy that follows a group of diverse editors of a popular food magazine who must find a way to keep their livelihoods afloat after a scandal forces out their Editor-in-Chief and subsequently, their fellow White colleagues.
- Davis is a Native Hawaiian-Chinese-Filipino writer born and raised on the island of Oʻahu. Upon graduating from culinary school, Kop worked as a chef in Hawaiʻi for several years before turning his efforts towards screenwriting. Kop attended Hawaiʻi Pacific University and graduated with a degree in Multimedia Cinematic Arts. During his time at HPU, Kop interned at The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson. Kop worked as a production assistant on FX’s Baskets. Recently, he was the writers’ assistant for FX’s It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia and Apple TV+’s Mythic Quest, and has written episodes for both series.
- Olivé (Jacqueline Olive)
- When All Is Lost – In order to keep her family from starving to death, a housewife enters the perilous black-market industry in 1946 post-war Japan and must keep it secret from her husband – a newly appointed Tokyo judge.
- Olivé is a Tongan-American filmmaker who’s worked most of her adult life near Tokyo and uses film as a tool to bring visibility to stories from her family’s history and culture as well as Japan’s. She recently worked on Pachinko as a Japanese Language Consultant, and in 2024, she entered a development deal with Pacific Islanders in Communications to direct Like Father Like Daughter, a documentary about Olivé, her father, and her Japanese ex-boyfriend who strive to heal their immigrant traumas while living together under one roof.
- Tia Kanaeholo
- Unprofessional – An overworked and underpaid alcoholic thinks she is perfectly balancing her career, relationships, and sobriety, but the temptation of LA’s “cocaine on Saturday, green juice on Monday” hustle culture might be her Achilles’ heel.
- Tia is a Native Hawaiian multi-hyphenate actor, writer, and producer. She recently earned her MFA in Writing and Producing for Television at Loyola Marymount University’s School of Film and Television where she was awarded the SFTV Writing and Producing for Television Department award. Her dramedy pilot ‘unprofessional’ received an Honorable Mention in the inaugural LMU MFA Screenwriting competition. In her work, Tia writes about complex individuals navigating spaces not meant for them while confronting and deconstructing their cultural identities just like she does every day.
- Sophia Perez
- Planet Oakland – A nerdy kid from another galaxy, Kornbeef Zorpas struggles to find his place in the chaotic halls of Oakland Middle School.
- Sophia is a Chamorro filmmaker with roots in the Mariana Islands and San Francisco Bay Area. She created and directed Island Time, a Chamorro children’s show shot on Saipan, and is currently directing Tip of the Spear, a documentary about the indigenous-led resistance to the ongoing military buildup in the Marianas. Sophia is a Pacific Islanders in Communications grant recipient, a co-founder of the Saipan-based nonprofit Fåha Digital Media, and a current PhD student in UC Berkeley’s Geography department.
- Matthew Dekneef
- The Beachboys – Waikiki, 1959. In the summer before Statehood, a rakish Native Hawaiian beach boy reaps the rewards of tourism, until an old flame and an unexpected discovery force him to question his loyalties.
- Matthew is a writer, born and raised on Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi. His writing draws inspiration from his Native Hawaiian heritage and oceanic homeland, often exploring the moral complexities faced by its island communities. As a journalist, he is the editor of Flux Hawaii, a Pacific-focused arts and culture publication, and formerly served as the editor of Lei, a travel journal for the LGBTQ community. He has reported on Hawaiian history, indigeneity, and issues for The New York Times, T Magazine, Them, SSENSE, Teen Vogue, and others. He is repped by 3 Arts and RBEL Agency.
- Taylor Foreman-Niko
- Samoan/American – When down-on-his-luck, Mark, a half-Samoan vet and felon, is approached by a shady CIA case officer with a deadly mission that requires he utilize his Samoan identity, he weighs its potential danger and moral compromises against the opportunity to finally feel connected to his culture.
- Taylor is a Samoan American writer currently residing in Los Angeles, California. He enjoys writing character-centric genre stories that explore identity. His horror feature, The Allerdale Bus Tragedy, was selected for the 14th annual BloodList of Best Unproduced Horror and Thriller Scripts, and his family drama feature, Behemoth was awarded Best Screenplay by the Los Angeles International Screenplay Awards for its inaugural Diversity Initiative. He was also recently selected to participate in the Stowe Narrative Lab, run by Stowe Story Labs in Vermont. He is repped by Jeff Portnoy at Bellevue.
Program mentors include:
- Naomi Scott (Great Scott Productions)
- Freddie Gutierrez (That Girl Lay Lay)
- Nevin Densham (Altered Carbon, Heroes Reborn)
- Kimberly-Rose Wolter (NCIS)
- Bryson Chun (Doogie Kamealoha, M.D.)
“There are only a handful of Pasifika writers in the industry so there’s a real urgency to build that pipeline, especially given the growing number of Pasifika stories being told by Hollywood with no Pasifika writers involved,” says PEAK executive director and co-founder, Kristian Fanene Schmidt. “This cohort is full of creativity and potential. There’s such depth and range across all of their scripts so we have our work cut out for us!”
