about

Ian Geronimo (he/him) is an LA-based FilAm writer / filmmaker whose work centers the prickly, peripheral and oft overlooked characters of the American territories. He holds an MFA from the AFI Conservatory in Screenwriting and another in Fiction with a specialization in Native American Literature from Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe, as well as a BA in English from the University of Oregon. His scripts have been developed by Jon Schumacher and Molly Smith of Black Label Media, and his recent work has placed in the Academy Nicholl Fellowship (semi-finalist), Austin Film Festival and BlueCat (quarter-finalist).

Growing up in Mesa, Arizona as a half-Filipino kid with a last name that saw him regularly mistaken for a person of Apache descent, Ian took keen interest in history, particularly that of American territories, as they were once known, and also the American West generally, as an actual space and as a kind of disputed symbol in the mythos of U.S. history. His less visible ancestry, as a descendant of white Mormon settlers (he is a direct descendant to Hyrum Smith, the brother of the founding prophet of the Church of Latter Day Saints) also fuels an ongoing interest in puritanical religion, spiritual colonialism, hierarchy, so-called cult-like behavior, and especially the relationship between these systems and addictive or self-destructive behaviors manifested at the individual level.

While at AFI, he was a teaching assistant to director Jeffrey Nachmanoff, as well as an intern for Riley Keogh’s production company Felix Culpa. For two years after his graduation from IAIA until the program saw it’s federal funding cut under the first Trump administration, he hosted Thunderbird Reading Series, featuring Native and First Nations literary fiction and poetry stars like Tommy Orange, Terese Mailhout, Jake Skeets and Sasha Lapointe.

An experienced presenter and public speaker, Ian has delivered readings, pitches or other forms of public presentation at the Lannan Foundation Garden Theater in Santa Fe, The Portland Art Museum, Vermont Studio Center, and the AFI Conservatory in Hollywood. His written work has been championed by Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Bread Loaf Writer’s conference, Writing by Writer’s in Boulder, Colorado and Rising Stars Desert Night’s at Arizona State University.