Bailey Donovan

Bailey Donovan grew up in Pittsburgh, PA, as a middle child of four equally creative siblings, and like all children, his heroes were Fred Rogers and the Rat King from Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker.

He spent his early days constantly drawing, with subjects ranging from the fantastic to the macabre. Eventually he found himself obsessed with world-building, designing elaborate video games and hand-drawing detailed storyboards for outlandish sci-fi epics.

In middle school, Bailey realized that the idyllic world he was raised to believe in – one where evils like racism, sexism, and environmental pillaging had already been solved – was a lie. So, right on cue, he began his angsty teenage rebel phase. Rather than find solace in affordable coping mechanisms like drugs or alcohol, Bailey teamed up with his brother Joel to co-write/direct their first feature film: a fan adaptation of Palahniuk/Fincher’s Fight Club, which reimagined the protagonist as an honors student whose alter ego leads a global youth rebellion against a failed public education system. (It had a runtime of just over two hours and has been hailed as “surprisingly watchable.”)

After graduating high school, Bailey took a gap year to focus on his depression, then attended Point Park University’s Cinema and Digital Arts Program, graduating at the top of his class. Post-graduation, he co-founded DragonWake Films with his brother, and teamed up with local Pittsburgh talent and the rest of his family to complete his second feature, the award-winning Back for Good, this time co-writing/directing with his sister Molly.

While in Pittsburgh, Bailey co-produced the official Sundance-selected short film, The Immaculate Reception, directed by Charlotte Glynn, and directed several other short films, web series and music videos. After being gently reminded of his own mortality by the horrors of 2020, Bailey finally left his beloved hometown to pursue writing and directing out West.

Bailey currently lives in Los Angeles, where he’s collaborating with his sister on another feature script and has completed an hour-long sci-fi pilot with his brother entitled Our Own Devices, which placed in the 2022 Austin Film Festival, the Shore Scripts Competition, the Scriptation Showcase, and other screenplay competitions.

As Bailey continues to develop his work, he hopes to make the world a kinder place by channeling his inner Fred Rogers and rejecting the toxicity of, say, the Rat King.

Joel Micah Donovan

From an early age, Joel Micah Donovan had a passion for both storytelling and computers. At age 9, he wrote both his first sci-fi storybook and his first computer program. He graduated from high school at the top of his class and went on to study computer science, robotics, film, and digital imaging at Carnegie Mellon University and Pittsburgh Filmmakers.

Right after college, Joel and his younger brother Bailey collaborated on a feature-length fan film, writing, shooting, and editing everything themselves. They came out of the project excited to pursue a career in filmmaking, but the debts they incurred during the production prompted Joel to enter the tech industry instead, leading to software engineering jobs at both Facebook and Google.

In 2013, Joel and Bailey founded DragonWake Films (now DragonWake Media), and in 2017 they released their first professional feature, Back For Good, on which Joel was an executive producer. In 2021 after eight years at Google, Joel finally resigned his position as a software engineer to pursue screenwriting full-time. He now lives with his wife Maggie Lu and son River in Los Angeles, California.