Naomi McDougall Jones is an award-winning actress, writer, producer, and women in film activist. Naomi wrote, produced, and starred in the 2014 micro-budget indie feature film, "Imagine I'm Beautiful," which took home 12 awards on the film festival circuit including 4 Best Pictures and, for Naomi, 3 Best Actress Awards and The Don Award for Best Independently Produced Screenplay of 2014. The film was named as #8 of OscarWorld's Top 10 Films of 2014 and was distributed theatrically and digitally by Candy Factory Films. Naomi’s second feature film, "Bite Me," is a subversive romantic comedy about the real-life subculture of people who believe that they're vampires and the IRS agent who audits them. In addition to writing the screenplay, Naomi stars in the film opposite Christian Coulson ("Harry Potter," "Love is Strange," "Nashville") and alongside Annie Golden ("Orange is the New Black") and Naomi Grossman ("American Horror Story"). Naomi once again re-teamed with the visionary and award-winning director Meredith Edwards, who also directed Imagine I'm Beautiful, and the film is produced by Jack Lechner ("Blue Valentine," "The Fog of War," former executive with Miramax and HBO), Sarah Wharton ("That's Not Us"), and Joanne Zippel (Zip Creative). The film will be released in 2019. A pilot she wrote, "The Dark Pieces," was named on the 2016 WriteHer List as one of the top 16 unproduced pilots by a female screenwriter and is now in development for Canadian TV. She was a writer for season 1 of Amazon's original series, "The New Yorker Presents," based on the world's most award-winning magazine, which premiered at Sundance 2016, for which she wrote the teleplay adaptation of Miranda July's short story "Roy Spivey." Naomi is a vocal advocate for bringing gender parity to film, both on and off screen. She has spoken at film festivals and conferences around the world and written extensively on this subject. Naomi gave a TEDTalk, "What It's Like to Be a Woman in Hollywood," which went viral in the fall of 2017 and has since been viewed over 1 million times. She has teamed up with former CFO of the City of Chicago, Lois Scott, and former EVP at Warner Bros, Jessica Goodman, to found The 51 Fund, a private equity fund to finance films written, directed, and produced by women. She is currently at work on a book, "The Wrong Kind of Woman: Dismantling the God of Hollywood," which is to be published by Beacon Press in January 2020. She hosts the podcast "Fear(ful)less: Filmmaking From the Edge," a monthly window into the successes, failures, and conversations of an independent filmmaker, which is available on iTunes and GooglePlay. Naomi never went to film school and has learned almost everything she knows through about a decade of coffee dates of anyone who would talk to her, working on projects with great people she could learn from, and figuring the rest out as she went along. The lack of practical information and transparency available to filmmakers is one of the things that drives her most crazy and she is passionate about sharing true, practical, hard-won knowledge so that we can build a stronger culture of collaboration, inclusion, and access. Website: www.naomimcdougalljones.com IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2328697/?ref_=tt_ov_wr