ABOUT

Born and raised in Fort Smith, Arkansas, Matthew Kaundart is an LA-based writer/director and graduate of the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Focused on creating character-driven, nuance-rich stories for both film and television, Matthew's been recognized as a Fellow for The Gotham/IFP Episodic Lab, a two-time finalist for the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, an Academy Nicholl Fellowships Quarterfinalist, and was recently named a ScreenCraft Fellowship Finalist. Currently, he's developing a feature screenplay inspired by his own family’s experiences involving addiction (read the Deadline announcement here) with Sidney Flanigan, Will Brittain, and Lio Tipton attached to star, as well as adapting a novel into a limited series detailing the real-life kidnapping that inspired Lolita. He’s repped for film and television by Aaron Kaplan and Andrew Murphy at Kaplan/Perrone Entertainment.

On the more experimental side of things, Matthew’s short-form projects often blur the line between documentary and scripted and have been programmed worldwide, including at Outfest, the American Documentary Film Festival, the Museum of Photographic Arts, REDCAT, and the Los Angeles International Short Film Festival. His work has also been featured in publications such as VICE, PAPER, i-D, Somesuch, LA Weekly, Narratively, Fast Company, AdWeek, and more. Beyond that, Matthew has worked as a treatment writer at Tool of North America and as a copywriter at 72andSunny, as well as edited videos for KCET and spent a summer writing for The Japan Times. If you’ve somehow managed to read this far, you might as well know he’s a major candy connoisseur and an avid pickleball enthusiast.