Kaitlyn Busbee
Filmmaker
Workshop: Following Curiosity: From Observation to Page to Screen
Kaitlyn T. Busbee is an Iowa-bred, New York-trained, Chicago-based filmmaker whose award-winning work explores intimate, character-driven stories. Blending drama with humor, she is drawn to films that examine identity, resilience, and the quiet revelations of everyday life. She earned her MFA from NYU Tisch School of the Arts, where she received the Martin Scorsese Scholarship, Maurice Kanbar Scholarship, and the 2023 ARRI Volker Bahnemann Award for Outstanding Cinematography.
Her forthcoming NYU thesis film, Jarfly, is executive produced by Spike Lee and supported by the 2024 Spike Lee/Sandra Ifraimova Production Fund and the Riese Organization Post-Production Award. Busbee was also selected by Spike Lee as one of three student filmmakers to write and direct branded short films for Coca-Cola and Vitamin Water. Her short film Layaway received the Black Family Film Prize and screened at HollyShorts and the Chelsea Film Festival, where it won the U.S. Shorts Audience Choice Award. As a cinematographer, she shot In Passing, which premiered at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival, and served as DP and field producer on Uprooted for HBO Max and Sesame Workshop’s Through Our Eyes.
Before graduate school, Busbee co-directed, shot, and edited the independent feature These Hopeless Savages, which screened at more than 30 festivals before its release on Amazon Prime and Apple TV. Her documentary The Legend in My Heart won Best Documentary at the Los Angeles Universe Multicultural Film Festival, while her shorts Sexpert Franzen and Bed Bugs earned festival recognition and a PBS broadcast premiere. She is currently completing post-production on Growing Up Rare, a documentary following two siblings coming of age amid medical uncertainty and emerging artistic identities, while developing her first narrative feature.
Learn more about Kaitlyn: https://kaitlynbusbee.com.
Workshop
“Following Curiosity: From Observation to Page to Screen.” Every story begins with an act of observation. Whether sparked by an overheard conversation, a personal memory, or a fleeting moment, stories must first find their way onto the page before they can come alive on screen. Through screenings of narrative and documentary short films, filmmaker Kaitlyn Busbee shares how observation, lived experience, adaptation, and creative constraints become the foundation of compelling screenplays and visual storytelling. Blending behind-the-scenes insights with practical storytelling exercises, this session invites writers to consider not only where stories come from, but how they evolve from an initial spark into scenes, images, and films. Along the way, Busbee pulls back the curtain on the creative exercises and storytelling philosophy of NYU Tisch’s Graduate Film Program, offering techniques that writers of every genre can apply to their own creative practice.