Gena Ellis

Gena (Taylor) Ellis grew up in the mountain lake town of Summersville, West Virginia going to the movies every Friday night and listening to her Appalachian family tell stories around the dinner table. Her father was a building contractor and a Marine veteran, her mother a bookkeeper for a land surveyor. Gena was the first college graduate in her family and is a graduate of Marshall University in Huntington, WV with a degree in English. After a few years in the army, Gena attended the University of Oklahoma and graduated in 2003 with an MLS in screenwriting and fiction. She wrote and co-produced the film Angela's Decision (2006) which she adapted from her own short story, "Billy's Return." The film won many awards, including Australia's Gold ACE Award for Cinematography, Tupelo's Best of Show, Houston's Gold Remi for Adaptation, and FilmMakers' American Gem Top 25 Screenplays. Both were part of her graduate thesis at the University of Oklahoma. The screenplay was discovered on Inktip.com and filmed in South Australia by director Mat King. The film stars Xavier Samuel and' Rhiannon Owen' and all original music was written and performed by Liam Gerner and Christopher Slaski. Gena has taught workshops at film festivals and universities, which led her to publish her story as the book, "Angela's Decision: A Journey of Adaptation" in 2016 on Amazon. It contains the script, the adapted short story, and relates the journey of how she became a writer and how her thesis script became an Australian film. She's also done background acting on TV shows and films and judged film festivals, such as the Tupelo Film Festival in Mississippi. She's also worked with her filmmaker daughter Ursula Ellis on a few of her student films. She recently had a radio drama recognized by the BBC International Radio Playwriting Competition and was Highly Commended in the Top 20 of over 1000 scripts.