Post by Joe Wood

Joe is an award-winning writer, creative executive, and entertainment professional with more than three decades of experience across music, film, and television. A graduate of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts (MFA, Dramatic Writing) and Belmont University (BA, Liberal Arts), Joe is a Grammy Award-winning collaborator whose credits span creative development, script analysis, production, and business operations. Joe has worked with industry leaders including Interscope Records, King World Productions, and Kushner-Locke, and served as a creative collaborator with Grammy-winning artist Keb' Mo'. As one of the more distinctive voices in contemporary dramatic writing, Joe's playwriting has been compared to the work of Yasmina Reza, David Rabe, and Kenneth Lonergan by acclaimed artistic directors and actors. In televison, a network showrunner has remarked that Joe writes better than half the writers in his NBC writer's room - a testament to Joe's dedication to his craft. A committed advocate for inclusive and progressive DEI practices, Joe has been at the forefront of building equitable, people-centered environments throughout a storied career. As a coach and mentor at Vanderbilt's Owen School of Management Summer MBA program under Professor David Owens, Joe brought a sophisticated understanding of budgets, human capital, deadlines, and resource efficiency to the program and his peers - the hallmarks of a true full-service entertainment professional, equally fluent in the language of creativity and commerce. The reader of over 1000 screenplays and pilots, and the recipient of the Future Screenwriter Scholarship, the Goldberg Dramatic Writing Scholarship, and a Creative Career Design Fellowship, Joe remains as driven off the page as on it. A former California State Champion in youth hockey, Joe also volunteers with Paws for Life - a remarkable program in which California prisoners serving life sentences train service dogs.