The Writers Guild Foundation, in collaboration with Storyline Partners and Define American, host this virtual panel discussion analyzing the history and current state of portraying authentic immigrant stories in entertainment. Tune in to hear guidance on how to approach future narratives thoughtfully to avoid harmful stereotypes and tropes.
Panelists include:
Bernardo Cubría - Like It Used to Be, Guerrero, Acapulco
Mike Gauyo - Ginny & Georgia, Insecure
Moujan Zolfaghari - The Detour, The Helpsters, Sesame Street
Moderated by Dulce Valencia, Senior Manager of Entertainment Engagement at Define American.
Panel starts at 4:00 p.m. Pacific Time.
RSVP for free or with a suggested donation of $10. All donations go towards producing future panels and events. After signing up, you’ll receive information on how to access the Zoom panel.
If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us at events@wgfoundation.org.
OUR PARTNERS
About the panelists
Bernardo Cubría is a Mexican playwright/screenwriter who lives in Los Angeles. For film, he penned the feature screenplay Like It Used to Be and Guerrero which Gina Rodriguez is attached to direct and star in, and he was a 2023 Sundance Screenwriters Lab fellow for the screenplay Kill Yr Idols which he cowrote and that Carlos Lopez Estrada is attached to direct. He was also a writer on Season 3 of Acapulco on Apple +. His play Crabs in a Bucket won the 2024 Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Writing. His play The Play You Want premiered at L.A.’s Road Theatre in 2022, garnering Cubría both a Stage Raw Award and a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle nomination for Playwriting. It received its regional premiere at Milagro Theatre in Portland in 2023. In 2019, Cubría was nominated for the Ovation, Stage Raw and Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Best Playwright awards for his play The Giant Void In My Soul. Other playwriting awards include the Smith Prize for Political Theater.
Mike Gauyo—born in Haiti and raised in Boston—graduated from The University of Massachusetts (Boston) with a degree in theatre. After college, he moved to LA to pursue a writing career, first landing in reality TV where he worked his way up from an assistant on shows like American Idol, So You Think You Can Dance, The MTV Awards, and The Emmys to a producer on shows like GSN’s Common Knowledge and E!’s The Comment Section.
A few years later, Mike would make the jump to scripted television, writing on the first two seasons of the highly successful Netflix dramedy, Ginny & Georgia and the final season of the critically acclaimed MAX series, Insecure. Mike then went on to co-create, co-showrun, and executive producer ALLBLK’s original series, Send Help, and is also the founder of Black Boy Writes Media, a talent incubator for marginalized voices and home to the Black Boy Writes/Black Girl Writes Mentorship Initiative, which is a pipeline program for pre-WGA Black writers.
Moujan Zolfaghari is an Emmy-nominated Iranian-American comedy writer who has written on shows like TBS's The Detour, AppleTV's The Helpsters, Tiny Chef, Sesame Street, many various pilots, and an upcoming DC/Amazon animated series. She's also an actor with credits on At Home with Amy Sedaris, Last Week Tonight, Gremlins: Secret of the Mogwai, Tooning out the News, and so much more, and is a co-creator and performer on Mission to Zyxx, a sci-fi audiocomedy series on Maximum Fun. You can sometimes find her performing on stage at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in both LA and NY. She is currently working on a feature about her brother's prom.
About the Moderator
Dulce Valencia is a writer, artist, and storyteller from Guerrero, Mexico based in Los Angeles. A passionate advocate for immigrant rights, she spent many years working in nonprofits advocating for comprehensive immigration reform and encouraging civic participation. She has been featured on Lifetime’s Her America and Apple TV’s Dear… and 271 Films’ We Are Here. Currently, she is the Senior Manager of Entertainment Engagement at Define American, where she helps lead the work to humanize immigrant stories through consulting and storyteller engagement. She unironically loves Telenovelas.