JULES CORRIERE, PLAYWRIGHT, SCREEN WRITER, DIRECTOR
After a long career as a playwright, Jules Corriere recently began writing for film and television. Her first short feature, "Standing in Line," has already been selected for numerous festivals, winning the "Hollywood Just 4 Shorts" and "Short Filmz" competitions, and chosen as a Finalist in the Los Angeles International Screenplay Awards. This same film also earned a second place award in the "First Monthly Film Festival" in Belgrade, Serbia; Honorable Mention in Hollywood Script Award, Honorable Mention in Art Film Awards (Macedonia), Honorable Mention in Wiki Screenplay Contest, semi-finalist in the Poppy Film Festival in 2022. Her second short film "Boom" was chosen as the winner of the Berlin Flash Film Festival in March 2022.
She writes and directs a monthly, one-hour radio show and podcast, “StoryTown,” now in its eleventh season, based on true stories from the Northeast Tennessee region, which performs at the International Storytelling Center and is broadcast on local NPR station 89.5 FM and streams worldwide and on the StoryTown app. In addition to her radio work, Corriere has been a playwright and theater director with Community Performance, International for over twenty years. This theatrical work is steeped in local culture, and developed with oral stories and histories to develop scripts that are performed by 40-70 community members of all ages and backgrounds as a way to bring people together across barriers of age, culture, religion and other obstacles. She wrote her first play, Story Lines, in 2000, based in Newport News, Virginia, and recently completed writing Life Lines, which premiered in Jonesborough, Tennessee (the “Storytelling Capital of the World) in February 2020. This play closed just as COVID-19 reached the country and shut down live-theater for over a year. Corriere pivoted and continued the much-needed story-based plays and radio shows to a livestream format and began a story-based podcast, which now has world-wide listeners. In the professional world, her work Let My People Go! A Spiritual Journey, written with composer Donald McCullough and Denny Clarke, performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. She received the Presidential Points of Light Award for The Whole World Gets Well in Chicago. Her community-based, all derived from true stories and histories, has toured internationally in England, Scotland, and Brazil. She served for five years as co-artistic director and playwright for Georgia’s Official Folk Life Play, Swamp Gravy, and her play Turn the Washpot Down became the official Folk-Life Play for the state of South Carolina. She has appeared in Who’s Who for her work in theater arts and social activism for the past decade. Since moving to Jonesborough, Tennessee in 2013, she has written over one-hundred episodes of her one-hour, non-fiction radio show. Her body of work encompasses a passion for bringing to life the extraordinary stories of ordinary people as a way to build community. She is an ALM Candidate in Creative Writing and Literature at Harvard, and completed her thesis in June 2022. While at Harvard, Jules served as a Harvard Extension Global Ambassador 2020-2021. Her thesis is her most current play which was produced in Jonesborough, Tennessee in June 2022.