Brian Keith Nelson
Adjunct Faculty

Brian Nelson's directing credits include his own adaptation of The Joy Luck Club for the Mark Taper Forum Literary Cabaret and award-winning work at theatres including East West Players, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Texas Shakespeare Festival and the Kennedy Center New Visions/New Voices Festival. As literary manager at East West Players, he inaugurated the David Henry Hwang Playwriting Institute, and received an Ovation nomination for directing Twelf Nite O Wateva! He is the editor of Asian American Drama: Nine Plays (Applause) and the author of Earth Bound (Skinner House Books).  Nelson's screenwriting debut, Hard Candy, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and has won various international awards including Best Picture and Best Script at the Catalonia Film Festival in Sitges, Spain.  His second film, the Columbia Pictures production 30 Days of Night, starring Josh Hartnett, Danny Huston and Ben Fowler, opens Halloween 2007, and he is currently working on feature screenplays for Universal Pictures and Dimension Films. Among his plays are Radiant, commissioned by the Alfred E. Sloan Foundation, Consolation, and Overlooked. His television writing includes the ABC miniseries 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and episodes of Lois and Clark, JAG, So Weird, Vanishing Son, Earth: Final Conflict, the German series Wolffs Revier, and In A Heartbeat, for which he won a 2001 Prism Award. He holds honors degrees from Yale and UCLA, and lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughters.