Cherien Dabis

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Cherien Dabis was born in 1976 to Palestinian/Jordanian immigrant parents in USA. She is an award-winning filmmaker and television writer and has been recognized by the industry's top organizations and trade publications, including the Sundance Institute, the IFP and Filmmaker Magazine. Dabis holds a BA with honors in communications and creative writing from the University of Cincinnati and she is an 2004 graduate of Columbia University's Masters of Fine Arts Film program. Dabis' short films have screened at some of the world's top film festivals.

In 2003, Dabis was awarded a Screenwriting Grant from the Professional Organization of Women in Entertainment Reaching Up (Power Up) for her short screenplay Little Black Boot (acquired by The Sundance Channel). Premiering at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, the film went on to win several Best Short Film awards and was a Grand Prize Winner of the 2004 PlanetOut.com Short Movie Awards. Dabis is also a recipient of the Power Up Filmmaker's Fund for her short Memoirs of an Evil Stepmother (acquired by MTV/Logo). Her short film-writing debut, Nadah, premiered at the 2003 Rotterdam International Film Festival and was nominated for the VC Film Festival's Golden Reel Award.

Her short film, Itmanna (Make A Wish)^[1], premiered at the 2006 Palm Springs International Festival of Short Films and Dubai International Film Festival where it won the Gold Muhr Award for Best Short Film. An official selection of the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin as well as Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival, Dabis received several generous grants in support of the film, including the National Geographic's All Roads Film Project Seed Grant, the Jerome Foundation's New York City Media Arts Grant as well as the New York State Council on the Art's Electronic Media and Film Distribution Grant.

For Amreeka, her feature film writing and directing debut slated to begin production in late Winter 2007, Dabis was invited to participate in the Sundance Institute's first ever Middle East Screenwriter's Lab and the 2006 Cannes Film Festival's inaugural Mediterranean Films Crossing Borders program.^[2] An alumnus of Film Independent's 2005 Director's Lab, Project: Involve Mentorship Program and Los Angeles Film Festival's Fast Track Program, Dabis also received a 2006 Artist Fellowship in Playwriting & Screenwriting from the New York Foundation for the Arts in support of the screenplay. Most recently, Screen International listed the project as one of the "Ten Arab Films to Watch" in 2007.

A Staff Writer on season three of Showtime's critically acclaimed television series The L Word, Dabis returned to season four as a Story Editor. As a feature film screenwriter, she has been awarded several distinguished awards in support of her screenplays including the Zaki Gordon Award for Excellence in Screenwriting, the Institute for Humane Studies Film and Fiction Scholarship and the New York Women in Film and Television Scholarship. Her production credits include Jane Campion's psychological thriller In the Cut and NBC's critically acclaimed television series The West Wing.

Before her work in film and television, Dabis worked as a media activist and public relations specialist in Washington, D.C., where she shaped national media coverage of key political issues from reproductive rights to environmental and consumer safety. Her communications campaigns helped pass legislation involving better FDA oversight of medical devices, reproductive health and civil rights. As a writer, her fiction and personal essays have been published in Mizna and Growing Up Girl, an Anthology of Voices from Marginalized Spaces.

Currently a writer and a producer of the 5th season of Showtime series The L word.

Partner of the director Rose Troche.