Beanie Barnes

Beanie Barnes is an artist primarily working in the areas of Screenwriting and Producing.

A narrative theorist who is a Finalist for the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences’ prestigious Nicholl Fellowship, Beanie is also a Film Independent Fellow, an Almanac Screenwriters Alum, and a Writers Guild of America East (WGAE)/FilmNation Screenwriting Fellow. Her drama screenplay, Bon Ton Roulér currently sits in the Top 1% of screenplays, out of 25,000, on the screenplay platform, Coverfly.

A former Teaching Artist at the award-winning youth filmmaking academy, the Ghetto Film School, Beanie is dedicated to educating young people through cinema and to using rigorous research and narrative framing to give voice to those who were silenced by racially driven false narratives and forgotten about by time. To this end, she is a current Film & Animation Juror for The National Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and is the investigative researcher who authored, built, and contextualized the “Springfield Race Riot of 1908” Wikipedia article, which became the basis of a five-year collaborative effort between herself, Northeastern University’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ), and Northwestern University’s Center of Wrongful Convictions, to obtain a posthumous pardon for Joe James – a young black man executed by the state of Illinois in 1908 – a matter which will be decided by the Governor of Illinois this fall.

Beanie got her start in the industry working as a Casting Associate on films like Barbershop and Spy Kids 2. She is experienced in all aspects of producing, inclusive of being the UPM/Line Producer who oversaw the production management of former Black Panther and activist, Jamal Joseph’s debut feature film, Chapter & Verse, and being Associate Producer on the Catherine Hardwicke-directed, and Art Linson-produced, film, Lords of Dogtown.

She would go on to become a staff writer on television shows for ABC Signature and Paramount Pictures Television, respectively. She’s also written film opinion pieces for Salon Magazine, has been a guest on the Final Draft podcast, “Write On,” and recently was a keynote speaker for the Council on Anti-Racism and Equity (CARE) Colloquium at the Yale School of Management. Prior to the Writers’ Strike, Beanie created and sold an original television show to ABC Signature, which she was also co-executive producing.

Beanie is based in New York City, where she was a feature film programmer for the Bushwick Film Festival, a film consultant whose company – 306 Releasing – oversaw the theatrical distribution for the 2013 Independent Spirit Award-nominated film, FOUR (through a partnership she obtained with AMC Theaters), and where, in the fall of 2022, she assumed leadership of Writers Group New York (WGNY) – a community of over 150 screenwriters – which has met every Wednesday for the last 15 years. She is currently a founding board member of a new cinematic foundation (to be introduced this fall) and is a proud member of the Writers Guild of America East (WGAe).

Beanie earned her B.A. from the University of Nebraska, where she was first exposed to cinema under the tutelage of prominent film scholars/filmmakers Drs. Gwendolyn Audrey Foster and Wheeler Winston Dixon, which is where she also became the first woman to take the field in Division-I men’s varsity football.

She earned her M.B.A. from Yale University with an emphasis on finance, strategy, and leadership.