Joey Johnsen

In my best Julia Roberts voice (a la “Notting Hill”):
I’m just a [Screenwriter], asking [literally anybody in the industry] for an [opportunity].

Howdy! Does anyone say “howdy” anymore? My name’s Joey and I’m a writer from Harlem, New York. I’m an NYU grad in Media, Culture, and Communications (whatever that means, right?), working a full time job in marketing sales while trying to make a SHARP left into a career in writing for the screen. Big screen. Small screen. Any sized screen.

My bio? Well, we’ll start with an icebreaker, as everyone loves so much. Let’s paint a scenario in which you ask me…I don’t know…my superpower?

Empathy is my superpower.

Okay, so that may have seemed a bit self-righteous, but hear me out.

Since childhood, I’ve always been a bit of a black sheep…no, a black unicorn. Born of a mother with blonde hair and blue eyes, growing up biracial with no connection to my father and his family resulted in an internalized sense of placelessness; a perpetual sense of imposter syndrome no matter what circle I found myself in. Being hella gay on top of that certainly didn’t help in my search for belonging. But in what has been a life-long endeavor to find a community and develop a firm grasp on my own identity, I’ve come to realize that that very intersectionality is what enables me to understand, to share, and with hope, to elevate the voices and narratives of the many marginalized communities that I represent. You see, it wasn’t so much that I didn’t know where I belonged, but rather that society burdens us with the task of choosing at all. Empathy is my superpower. My weapon of choice? A pen (Final Draft). And the enemy…fear.

At a moment in time where it seems as if the world itself has gone aflame, a news cycle bludgeoning us over the head with images of mankind holding a torch to its own feet, the stories we tell strengthen the truth that Maya Angelou so eloquently captured: We are more alike…than unalike. And while I don’t believe hate to be a natural human response, fear certainly is. It is no doubt that we fear what we do not know, and from my perspective as a black unicorn, there is a severe lacking in understanding as a society. Storytelling, in my opinion, can be one of the most effective ways to inspire empathy and a remedy for those with the inability to see the humanity in others unlike themselves. Through responsible and nuanced storytelling in a medium capable of touching every mind, my aim is to carve out a space in entertainment for the diverse voices of the LGBTQIA+ community and people of color, and while representation certainly matters, I believe further that the kind of representation matters even more. It has been said that you cannot become what you cannot see, and I want to write the stories that birth dreams, an understanding that someone with melanin in their skin or fruit in their cake can take up any space they might so choose.

So while this may seem like a heavy answer to the ice-breaker that literally nobody asked for, as a storyteller it is my burden to prove Angelou right. Empathy is my superpower. My weapon of choice? A pen (Final Draft).