Sally Seitz is a writer-director for the stage and screen. She is originally from Nashville, Tennessee, though she spent seven years calling Austin, Texas home. Often, her scripts use humor and heartbreak to depict modern southern women and have been described as “if Flannery O'Connor was on a dating app.”
Her rom com screenplay, Too Many Fish in the Sea was the first place winner of CMU’s 2023 Alfred P. Sloan Script Competition and a quarter-finalist in Final Draft’s Big Break. Her one-act play, The Monument Maker, was selected by The Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival as a John Cauble Regional finalist. Her plays and monologues have been produced, commissioned or workshopped by Project Y Theatre’s Women in Theatre (WIT) Festival, New Manifest Theatre Company, ScriptWorks, KCACTF, and The Ensworth School as a culmination of her work as a visiting teaching artist. Her short play Please Do Not Touch the Art (playwright & director) and her one-woman show Soldier of the Cross (playwright & director) were selected for Hyde Park Theatre and FronteraFest’s ‘Best of Fest’ showcases in 2020 and 2019. For six years and counting, Sally has been a part of the Austin Film Festival team, working as the Young Filmmakers Program Director, Grants and Copywriter, and as the script writer for AFF’s On Story TV/radio show and podcast.
During her time at CMU, Sally directed the short plays Jazz Band by Christine Swenson and Bu-Ble-Gum, Bu-Ble-Gum by Kandace James. Last fall, Sally co-developed and instructed “Harvesting Personal Narratives: A Dramatic Writing Workshop” with cohort member Robin Goldberg. Later this spring, Sally will script supervise on set of her dark-comedy short-film Just Out of Reach directed by CMU MFA candidate Tatiana Baccari, and present the thesis reading of her stage play Six Inches Above the Knee.
Plays
Okay, so, here’s the thing, the valedictorian gets to speak, the salutatorian gets to speak, so that leaves exactly, only, one more student speaker spot at The Harpeth Valley Preparatory School for Girls 2013 graduation ceremony. And it will be absolutely over Mary Elizabeth, Mary Alice, Mary Louise, and M.Kat’s DEAD BODIES that they miss the chance to finally expose Coach Mag and tell the whole school community what he did to their friend Mary Morgan. It’s about time everyone heard her side of the story. Revenge is best served in a kilt.
In Keep Me Company, Emily, Elena, and Becca, are three friends in their late twenties who meet every Friday night to have beers on Becca’s back porch in Austin, Texas, but recently, their weekly ritual is in jeopardy as the three friends find different avenues for individual growth. This change, accompanied by the arrival of a lurking and particularly vocal Barn owl, calls into question the stability of their friendships. Each woman interrupts the owl’s presence with a different lens - Becca is adamant the owl is just an owl, Emily finds peace in the bird’s company, and Elena worries the owl is in fact La Lechuza, a witch from Mexican folklore, here to punish Becca for her affair with a married man. The play exists in that special time at night where reality brushes with myth, magic, fable, and faith and explores the phase of late, young adulthood where your found family is the precipice of disintegration.
Successes
The Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival John Cauble Regional Finalist, Original One-Act play, The Monument Maker
The Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival selected plays for the 2024 Region 2 festival, The Monument Maker and Keep Me Company
First Place Winner ($25,000 award) of the Alfred P. Sloan Screenwriting Competition at Carnegie Mellon University, Original Feature Screenplay selected, Too Many Fish in the Sea
Quarterfinalist, Final Draft’s Big Break Screenwriting Contest, Original Feature Screenplay selected, Too Many Fish in the Sea
ScriptWorks and Hyde Park Theatre’s FronteraFest Short Fringe Best of Fest and Best of Week Showcases and official commission, Original short play selected, Please Do Not Touch the Art
ScriptWorks and Hyde Park Theatre’s FronteraFest Short Fringe Best of Fest and Best of Week Showcases, Original short play selected, Soldier of the Cross