Nancy Beverly

About Nancy Beverly

I’ve been writing since I was knee-high to Mad Magazine.  My professional life began, though, at Actors Theatre of Louisville (home of the renown Humana Festival of New American Plays) where I was the Asst. Lit Manager and had a slew of 10 minute plays done.

The L.A. writers / actors group Fierce Backbone (our name comes from a quote by Virginia Woolf) has been my theatre home since 2009 and is where I’ve developed several plays including Community (made the finals – top 12 – of the American Association of Community Theatres play contest) and Connectivity which just made the finals of the Garry Marshall New Works Festival in 2019.

My favorite recent theatrical experience was the workshop production of my play Handcrafted Healing at the Athena Project in Denver.  I’ve also had plays done at the Hollywood Fringe Festival, the Rainbow Festival of Asbury Park, and Bloomington Indiana’s Blizzard of Short Plays.

On the Hollywood front, I’ve worked in TV for many years and sold scripts to Showtime’s Women Series, Roseanne (long hours… big personalities…) and Blossom.  I also got to pitch stories on such hit shows as Desperate Housewives and Ghost Whisperer as an Exec Producer’s assistant. 

I decided a few years ago that I wanted to produce my own work and subsequently raised the money and made my 37-minute film Shelby's Vacation, a lesbian dramedy which won the Audience Favorite Award in July 2019 at the Perth (Australia) Dyke Drama Festival as well as Best Acting Duo and Best Romance Short at the Olympus Film Festival in L.A.  It was also an official selection at Chicago’s Reeling Festival, Outshine in Ft. Lauderdale, the North Carolina Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, the Indianapolis LGBT Film Festival, L.A.’s Best Shorts Competition, where it won an Award of Merit, and The Lady Filmmakers Festival, where it gleaned the Best LGBTQ Film award.  The feature version of the Shelby script made the semi-finals of Chicago's Pride Films and Plays contest. 

I also co-wrote and co-produced The Calamities of Jane, an 11-part web series running 90 minutes, about a woman over 50 who is dealing with ageism and sexism in Hollywood (imagine that?!).  Jane made it into a variety of festivals and won Best Web Series at the L.A. Independent Film Festival. 

My current projects are The Cleaning Crew (made the top 3% of the Orchard Script Development workshop in 2018) and The View from Above, both TV drama pilots.  The Cleaning Crew is about a small hazmat clean-up team in L.A. ("Messy weed-killer?  Messed up life?  We can assist”).  The View From Above is about mysterious crop circles appearing in the Midwest.  I’ve actually been to the ones in England and incorporate real facts into the show, and believe me, the formations are more complex and their messages are more profound than, “Aliens are invading!” as one might guess from the Mel Gibson movie Signs.

I’m also a trance channel (I allow spirit guides to speak through me) and so my work, in addition to being character-driven and dryly funny, often examines life’s challenges from a metaphysical angle.

On the personal front, I’m an avid hiker and have led over 350 hikes with the Sierra Club and have summited Mt. Whitney (tallest peak in the lower 48) and hiked the Grand Canyon – all the way down and all the way back.  Most recently, I made it to the top of Half Dome in October 2019.