Beverly “Bev” Chukwu is a Nigerian American writer-director, story consultant, and script doctor. Her narrative short film projects have screened at the African Film Festival Atlanta; Women in Horror Film Festival; Cine Las Americas; AGLIFF; and more. Along with her achievements as a filmmaker, including a “Best First-Time Director” award at the Portland New Alternative Voices Festival, Bev’s screenplay PRINCE OF LAVENDALE STREET was the feature winner in the 2021 BlueCat Screenplay Competition, and her video essay “Sometimes Black” is now used as educational material at the University of Texas at Austin. She has spent over seven years working in various mental health arenas and a year providing behavior therapy to neurodivergent youth and adults. Bev has received fellowships from the Black List x WIF Episodic Lab; Google’s YouTube Originals Black Voices Creator Program, which also provided financial support for her narrative short film “Princess”; and the James A. Michener Center for Writers, where she received an MFA in screenwriting and fiction.

For over three years, Bev served as a Development Executive for Pipeline Media, reading and elevating the work of writers worldwide. Bev continues to advocate for 

filmmakers as an independent script consultant, EA to the Head of Film and Creative Media at the Austin Film Society, and through her relationships teaching for the nationally acclaimed Torch Literary Arts organization, the Writers League of Texas, Austin Bat Cave, and other local non-profits. In 2023, alongside Maryan Nagy Captan, Bev co-founded Ayagozie Productions, an independent production company that focuses on culturally inclusive storytelling in the Texas area.

As a speculative writer, Bev's long-form projects investigate the strangeness of the everyday, embracing the story capabilities of sci-fi, suspense, and fantasy. In a similar vein, her short-form projects, including her writing for New Sky Kids (2017) and How Are We Today (forthcoming season 2), lean into the vast possibilities of mental health content. She's particularly interested in stories that explore assimilation, groupthink, and mental health issues amongst people of the Black diaspora.