Nick Roth is a writer, producer, and recovering academic. He grew up in LA to parents in the film industry (his father is a director, his mother worked in distribution), and to rebel against them he went to grad school for his PhD in English at Cornell University, thinking that oughta show them. He ended up teaching film and writing there for three years. His dissertation, "Potential Cinema: Closet Film in Twentieth-Century Fiction," is the first book-length study of novels and short fiction written using screenplay formatting. Before he'd even finished it, he had one foot out the academic door, and spent several months in China developing the adapted screenplay for what would later become "Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe." In 2013 he moved back to Los Angeles, and began writing and producing short films while substitute teaching high school to pay the bills. His 2015 short "Coming To" won the jury's Grand Prize for Fearless Filmmaking at Slamdance.