Catherine Wignall is a screenwriter and cat lover from England who made her feature film debut in March 2020 with the Blumhouse YA horror-comedy CRAWLERS, shortly after graduating from the UCLA Screenwriting MFA program. She then created and wrote GOOD LUCK HAVE FUN, a middle-grade romcom YouTube series for MGM and Brat TV. She was recently named one of Austin Film Festival's 'Screenwriters to Watch' and has multiple projects in development with global production companies.
In the UK, Catherine was selected for the inaugural Screen Yorkshire Flex Development Lab where she developed GHOUL FRIENDS, an LGBT+ comedy, with Bombito Productions. In 2022 GHOUL FRIENDS received development funding from the British Film Institute for a Writers’ Room. Catherine was thrilled to be running her own room so early in her career, and loved working with other writers to ready her TV show for commissioners. She was then selected for the BFI Midlands Development program, before being awarded funding for career development to direct her own short for the first time through the BFI Short Film Fund.
Catherine is an Underwire-Euroscript winner, a two-time Austin Film Festival Comedy Pilot Finalist, and a Sundance Second Rounder. She received a $50,000 screenwriting scholarship from Fulbright and a $10,000 scholarship from BAFTA, as well as the Carl David Memorial Fellowship in Film and Video for LGBT+ representation and the Larry Thor Scholarship. After graduating from UCLA, she became a BAFTA LA Newcomer, and then a BAFTA Connect member.
Although she set out to be a serious writer who wrote about serious things, Catherine has gradually come to accept that she can’t quite bury her wry sense of humour and is perhaps at least a little funny. She enjoys writing about young women and pop culture, tackling serious subjects in a light-hearted manner, and all with an eye to increasing diversity on the small and big screen.
When not writing, she spends most of her time wishing she was a witch, a cat in a well-off family, or Harry Styles’ best friend. She is represented by Ensemble Entertainment in the US and Dench Arnold in the UK.