Jim Kenney

A teacher for the City University of New York, I received a New York Foundation of the Arts Gregory Millard fellowship for my screenplay, "Secret Vienna." After getting married to my very patient wife, Joanna, and having two wonderful children, I returned to screenwriting in earnest a year and a half ago and have had a good run, with the high point being my comedy television pilot, "The Whip," purchased by Spike TV/Viacom after winning the Spike TV/Scripped pilot competition.

In addition, I sold the feature sci-fi script "Periphery" to Transfatty Productions. I was a finalist for the comedy-thriller "Mrs. Highsmith" in the Steven De Souza/Scripped.com Unknown Sender contest; was a semi-finalist in the Edward Burns/Scripped.com contest for the romantic comedy "Tremble, Sigh,Wonder"; and won a Scripped.com Pro Contest for a short script, "Barefoot Romeo."

Recently, I did several feature film treatments for Author Solutions Films, and my mystery-thriller "Genius" (a reworking of the script that achieved me the NYFA grant) was a quarter-finalist in the 2011 Page Awards and a winner of the 2010 Championship Screenwriting Contest. "Counterpoint" was a quarter-finalist in the 2010 Francis Ford Coppola Zoetrope competition, and "The Empty Chair" was a semifinalist in the 2011 Page Awards and is currently a "qualifier" in the British Short Screenplay Competition. I also was a recent finalist in the New Yorker Caption Contest.

I live and watch too many movies in New York City with my family, but have spent some time in Europe (Poland and Hungary, specifically), teaching and writing. I wanna return, but preferably by selling an international thriller and making someone else pay for the trip.