Dawn Smith(XVII)

Dawn Smith is a writer, director, and producer residing in Boston, Massachusetts, by way of Los Angeles and Chicago. She received her B.A. from University of California Irvine, was involved in a summer intensive at USC Film School and interned at Media Process Group. She was a winner of the USC Student Film Festival for her short film "Isolation." Her screenplay "The Weasel Men" landed her in the top 15% of the Nicholl Fellowship screenwriting competition in 2010. Her screenplay, "The Light Fantastic" was a second rounder finalist at the Austin Film Festival in 2016. Her web series shorts, "Paid For By", won Best New England Comedy and SENE Film Festival, and was involved in various film festivals across the country, including Provincetown International Film Festival and Women In Comedy Festival. In Chicago, Dawn was an associate producer at AKPD Message and Media, previously known as Axelrod & Associates, and worked on political candidate and issue ads. Since relocating to Boston she has been working as a freelance producer and writer, most recently field producer for Bernie Sanders' campaign commercials. In 2018 Dawn wrote, directed, and co-produced a comedy web series, Paid for By, which explores the zany world of politics through the lens of political commercial production. The hero of the series, Margot Meriwether, is a political commercial producer with a conscience, who desperately believes she's making the world a better place one disastrous political ad at a time.