Cord Jefferson

Cord Jefferson is an Academy Award-winning and Emmy Award-winning writer and director. Jefferson made his feature writing and directorial debut with “American Fiction” (2023). The film won the People's Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival and went on to receive numerous accolades, including five Academy Award nominations. Jefferson won in the category of ‘Best Adapted Screenplay.’ Jefferson also won a BAFTA, a Critics’ Choice Award, a Writer’s Guild Award and an Independent Spirit Award for his screenplay, an adaptation of Percival Everett’s “Erasure.” He was also nominated for “Outstanding Directorial Achievement in a First-Time Theatrical Feature Film” at the DGA Awards, and the “Darryl F. Zanuck Award for Outstanding Producer of Theatrical Motion Pictures” at the PGA Awards. Jefferson’s television credits are a powerhouse of critically acclaimed series that include HBO’s groundbreaking limited series Watchmen, for which he won an Emmy award for Outstanding Writing For A Limited Series alongside Damon Lindelof, for their episode “This Extraordinary Being.”

Other credits include the philosophical comedy The Good Place, and drama series tour-de-force Succession. Jefferson earned two Writers Guild Awards and an NAACP Image Award for writing The Good Place’s “Tinker, Tailor, Demon, Spy” episode. Jefferson’s other credits include the HBO Max series Station Eleven and Netflix’s Master of None, for which he wrote the episode “New York, I Love You.”

Prior to making his way into television, Jefferson was a journalist, most notably serving as the West Coast editor for Gawker. During his tenure in journalism, Jefferson also wrote for such outlets as The New York Times, National Geographic, NPR, USA Today, MSNBC, Bookforum, and The Daily Beast, among others.