Kristen Edney

2022 Minority Report Fellow
Columbia University

WEFT
Logline: A college student’s new weave hair isn’t 100% natural; it’s supernatural. After her grandmother’s tragic accident, she and the possessed hair get tangled up in an epic battle of good and evil in the hood.

Kristen Edney is a drama writer and director hailing from New York. Relatively new to the craft, her journey into filmmaking has been a wandering one. Majoring in anthropology and gender studies as an undergraduate, Kristen believes the tools from these disciplines contribute directly to her creative process. For Kristen, storytelling can be inclusive and opening. But let’s face it – storytelling can also be a means to power, conformity and mindlessness. To combat these tendencies in her own writing, Kristen is interested in locating power in her stories where it has not previously existed. What happens when those who have been historically perceived as powerless, both embody and exercise power? In doing so, might they also contribute to the very systems that have confined their own existences and those of their communities? She does not invent characters; they invite her into their worlds – sometimes gentle, and at other times dystopic and uninhabitable. She is completing an MFA in Screenwriting and Directing at Columbia University 's School of the Arts.