Gabrielle Gorman is a film writer, producer, director, and activist. Gorman was born on March 7, 1998 in Los Angeles, California, and is the twin sister of poet Amanda Gorman. The sisters and their sibling were raised by single mother Joan Wicks, a sixth grade English teacher in the Los Angeles community of Watts. In their youth, their mother allowed them limited access to television and they attended private school New Roads in Santa Monica.
Before starting high school, Gorman wrote a poem titled “Blossom,” which she later turned into a film in 2014. Her six-minute experimental film “Dear America,” which was a reaction to the police shooting of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, earned her the 2016 Best Student Experimental award at the My Hero International Film Festival in Laguna Beach, California.
Gorman enrolled in UCLA in the fall of 2016, and was selected to be a Shandaland Shadowee, the name given to interns working on Shonda Rhimes television production sets for Scandal and How To Get Away With Murder. The same year she was named one of the top seven filmmakers in the U.S. by the National YoungArts Foundation and was additionally honored with the highest award an American youth artist can achieve, the U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts nomination. She also received the Aaron Sorkin Writing award.
Gorman worked as a video editing intern at Complex Networks in Los Angeles from June to October 2017. In 2018, Gorman was an executive intern in Echo Park, a film collective founded by director Ava Duvernay. She also produced a video for the 2nd Women’s March and worked as a content development intern at Scooter Braun Projects. Gorman directed a short documentary about a 99-year-old African American WWII veteran titled “Mr. Ewing” in 2019. Gorman graduated cum laude from UCLA ‘s School of Film and Television in 2020 with a BA in screenwriting.
In her young career, Gorman has worked with a number of nonprofits and initiatives such as TEDx and the California Arts Council. She has also discussed her films in Essence and the Daily Bruin (the UCLA student newspaper), and on NPR. She most recently edited and directed the viral PSA #Vote4theFuture and brought her thesis to life as the screenplay, Bell Parks, via a vlog style YouTube Series. Gorman continues to pursue her love for digital storytelling to promote positive social change.