Ariel Sayegh is a writer-director who explores infamous characters, outrageous real-life stories, and control freaks who've lost all control. She has developed screenplays with New Line Cinema, Steve Bucks Productions, 3311 Productions, and Roth/Kirschenbaum Films.
Her screenplay FRENEMY landed on the annual Black List, an industry insider poll of the best un-produced scripts currently floating around Hollywood. The potential of the script (and its comedic take on Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton's feud) drew solo coverage in W, Vice, Dazed, and PAPER Magazine, which dubbed it "one of the buzziest entries on the list."
Previously, Ariel won the Bluecat Screenplay Competition. Her other screenplays have reached the finals in Final Draft's Big Break Competition (top 3) and Script Pipeline (top 10.) Additionally, she was named a Semifinalist in the Academy Nicholl Fellowship and Film Independent’s Project Involve. As a director, Ariel was also recognized with a Chinese Academy Award for Documentary Film. (She almost got detained by the communist government in doing so.)
Ariel was house-broken by the USC School of Cinematic Arts, which awarded her a full-tuition Trustee Scholarship. There, she became the first student in USC history to be accepted into both their Writing for Screen & Television and Film Production divisions. She went on to win the Jeffrey Jones Scholarship for Excellence in Writing and the Marguerite Roberts Screenwriting Award. She was also selected to give a TEDx Talk on behalf of the university.
Today, that kind of ambition drives Ariel to defy her lactose intolerance and eat large amounts of cheese. She is a member of the Writers Guild of America West.
