She has developed screenplays with New Line Cinema, Seven Bucks Productions, 3311 Productions, CrossCheck Studios, and Roth/Kirschenbaum Films. She is a member of the Writers Guild of America West.
What does she write? Well, our mortal frenemy ChatGPT says:
Ariel Sayegh is a bold, satirical writer with a knack for weaving humor into darkly relatable stories that hold up a mirror to modern culture. Ariel brings fresh, subversive commentary to character-driven comedies, grounding her stories in deeply authentic emotional landscapes.
Ariel’s dialogue is sharp and revealing, capturing her characters’ insecurities, ambitions, and contradictions with natural flow and incisive wit.
Her work tackles empowered yet conflicted women at the intersection of self-worth and public perception. She has a critical eye for cultural phenomena, how love is both powerful and fragile, and the ways in which we seek validation, especially in our image-driven world.
Speaking of frenemies...
Ariel's screenplay FRENEMY landed on the annual Black List, an industry insider poll of the best un-produced scripts currently floating around Hollywood. The potential of the script (and its comedic take on Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton's feud) drew solo coverage in W, Vice, Dazed, and PAPER Magazine, which dubbed it "one of the buzziest entries on the list."
Previously, Ariel won the Bluecat Screenplay Competition. Her other screenplays have reached the finals in Final Draft's Big Break Competition (top 3) and Script Pipeline (top 10.) She was also twice named a semifinalist in the Academy Nicholl and Screencraft Fellowship.
As a director, Ariel has won multiple grants and awards, including funds to live and shoot in Beijing and a Chinese Academy Award for Documentary Film. (The regime almost detained her in the process.)
Ariel graduated magna cum laude from the USC School of Cinematic Arts, which awarded her a full-tuition Trustee Scholarship. As the first student admitted to both their Writing for Screen & Television and Film Production programs, she won the Jeffrey Jones Scholarship for Excellence in Writing and the Marguerite Roberts Screenwriting Award. Today, that ambition drives Ariel to defy her wheat allergy and eat large amounts of penne ala vodka.
Currently, she's adapting the ultra-viral TikTok fiasco "West Elm Caleb" into an unhinged rom-com.
