NEW YORK CITY — The Post New York Alliance (www.postnewyork.org) is hosting a podcast on Friday that marks the Equity & Inclusion Committee’s first official event. “Black Perspectives: The Diversity Hire” will take place at 4:30pm (EST) and will feature professional screenwriters Sherman Payne and Shukree Hassan Tilghman, whose podcast "The Diversity Hires" explores the craft, business, art, and commerce of the screenwriting trade.
Photo (L-R): Payne and Tilghman
Sherman Payne is a screenwriter, originally from Ohio, now living and working in LA. He has written projects for MTV, BET, The CW, Warner Bros. TV, Sony Pictures Classics, Blumhouse and Amazon, among others. In 2020, his debut feature film Charm City Kings premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Most recently, he was a writer and producer on Showtime's hit series Shameless, which just concluded its final season.
Shukree Hassan Tilghman’s career began cutting “redneck reality” and house flipping shows before landing a job as a writer on the USA drama series Satisfaction. He went on to write on the CW series The Vampire Diaries and penned the pilot Tempest for Universal Cable Productions and NBC. Recently, he spent two seasons as a writer and producer on the Emmy nominated NBC series This Is Us, and developed and wrote drama pilots at both HBO and Hulu. Currently, he is a writer and co-executive producer on the TNT drama Animal Kingdom, and is writing and developing a drama series at HBO Max. Tilghman has also produced and directed non-fiction projects, including the PBS documentary film More Than A Month and The March @50.
Payne and Tilghman will discuss how they got their start in television, how their backgrounds shaped their writing careers, and their perspectives on the challenges the industry faces in diversifying the television community.
Register for the free event.