Kate Royal is a playwright and filmmaker from Tappan, New York. Her work in both film and theatre centers on character-driven stories of women and the LGBT+ community. She is currently an MFA candidate in Writing for the Screen + Stage at Northwestern University and holds a BA in Theatre/English with a minor in Film Studies from SUNY Geneseo. Her plays include Mammoth (Nominated for Best Play of 2015 by Rochester City Newspaper), The Nameless Days of Gumdrop Smith (Featured in the 2014 Rochester Fringe Festival) and Queen for a Day (selected for workshop in 2015 by Chicago Dramatists) among others. Kate has held assistantships alongside Michael Sexton, Artistic Director of the Shakespeare Society, playwright Elizabeth Wong, and recently served as Artistic Intern with Pegasus Theatre Chicago. She is also recognized as an Artist-in-Residence at the Multi-use Community Cultural Center in Rochester, New York. In addition to dramatic writing, Kate has freelanced film and television criticism for AfterEllen.com and Monday Morning Matinee (mmmfilm.net). In the coming year, Kate is preparing to release the first season of her original webseries In Real Life, about the lives of four LGBT millennials, in development with OpenTV for 2017.