Yolanda Buggs

Yolanda Buggs is an award-winning writer/director from Decatur, Georgia. She began her career as a WGA Writer-Trainee on the sitcom, The Parkers. While working on the show, she directed the new 30-second Main Titles for Season 4 of the series. Later, Yolanda worked as an in-house producer for Steve Harvey's production company where she successfully supervised multiple projects. Further accomplishments by Ms. Buggs include producing an independent sitcom, Beauty & The Baller, which streams on Amazon Prime. She made her feature film directorial debut with a suspense thriller entitled, As Evil Does, which streams on TubiTV and IMDB TV. Most recently, Yolanda has completed an experimental short film project utilizing a unique, first-person storytelling approach. In The Gray creatively fuses color and black & white imagery within the same frame while integrating real time color saturation and desaturation. This imaginative narrative shines a spotlight on the topic of gender diversity. Yolanda Buggs is a prolific writer, director, and producer whose talents have been recognized in various competitions over the years. Most recently, her short film, In The Gray, has been nominated for Best LGBTQ Short and Best Experimental Short in the IndieFilmFest. She has won an Outstanding Directing and Producing Award at the Los Angeles Web Festival; She also won first place in the Fox Diversity Television Writing Program with her spec sitcom script. Additionally, her original feature, Lovejoy, won the grand prize award in the Cynosure Screenwriting Competition, a contest geared toward female protagonist driven stories. Ms. Buggs has placed as a Semi-Finalist in the Women in Film/Black List Episodic Writing Lab with her drama pilot, Suburbia Falls. The Emerging Screenwriters Competition also recognized Yolanda's original drama and comedy pilots, Suburbia Falls and The Lesbian Guide For Idiots, as Semi-Finalists. Yolanda's proudest writing achievement has been placing in the top 10% of the Academy Nicholl Screenwriting Fellowship with her non-linear dramatic feature screenplay, Awakened, which lends voice to the LGBTQ+ communities. Yolanda is a talented filmmaker, who also has an immense love for education. Professor Buggs received her M.F.A. in Screenwriting from the American Film Institute and is presently a Professor at Loyola Marymount University where she teaches screenwriting. She has also taught screenwriting at Emory University in Atlanta. Additionally, Ms. Buggs has also worked with Kids in the Spotlight, a non-profit organization that instructs foster kids on how to craft screenplays. Yolanda is a member of Women in Film, Film Independent, and Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.