female
Jessie Nelson wrote, directed and produced Corrina Corrina and I Am Sam, starring Sean Penn. She co-created and executive produced Sara Bareilles' Little Voice for Bad Robot and Apple TV. Among her other directing credits are Curb Your Enthusiasm and Love, The Coopers. Her writing credits also include Step Mom and The Story of Us. Nelson wrote the Broadway musical Waitress with music and lyrics by Sara Bareilles, which went on to the West End in London. Nelson directed Alice By Heart, which she co-wrote with Steven Sater with music by Duncan Sheik at the National Theater Connections Program in London and at MCC in NYC. She began her career as an actress at the Public Theater, working with the experimental theater, Mabou Mines, and acting with the New York Shakespeare Festival. Nelson is executive producing Nikesh Shukula's Brown Baby and Glennon Doyle's Untamed for television. She wrote the children's book Labracadabra.
London, 1940. Amidst the rubble of the Blitz of World War II, fifteen-year-old Alice Spencer and her best friend, Alfred, are forced to take shelter in an underground tube station. Sick with tuberculosis, Alfred is quarantined, with doctors saying he won't make it through the night. In her desperation to keep him holding on, Alice turns to their favorite pastime: recalling the book that bonded them, and telling the story that she knows by heart--the story of Alice in Wonderland. What follows is a stunning, fantastical journey that blends Alice's two worlds: her war-ravaged homeland being held together by nurses and soldiers and Winston Churchill, and her beloved Wonderland, a welcome distraction from the bombs and the death, but a place where one rule always applies: the pages must keep turning. But then the lines between these two worlds begin to blur. Is that a militant Red Cross Nurse demanding that Alice get BACK. TO. HER. BED!, or is it the infamous Queen of Hearts saying...something about her head? Soon, Alice must decide whether to stay in Wonderland forever, or embrace the pain of reality if that's what it means to grow up.
