Anika Shakir

Born in the Suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia and a graduate of Georgia State University, Anika Shakir is a NBC TV Writer’s Program 2022 Finalist. She’s a South Asian writer and filmmaker currently based in Los Angeles, California where she recently attended The New York Film Academy to study filmmaking, which resulted in a few short films she directed. She is the daughter of a Bangladeshi and Pakistani immigrant and found her calling to be in the film industry after binging episodes of Hannah Montana growing up. Her TV drama pilots and horror feature scripts not only aim to bring positive Muslim representation to the screen, but also thematically deals with topic such as survival, family, feminism, spirituality, oppression, and more. She currently works as a developer for Microsoft and her future work aims to shed light on the positive and negative impact technology has on society as a whole. Although she enjoys her day job, she would gladly trade it in for a seat in a writer's room. Her TV pilot scripts QUEENS and THE UNDERGROUND have gone on to place in several screenwriting competitions, such as The Atlanta Film Festival Screenplay Competition, ScreenCraft Fellowship 2021, WeScreenplay Diverse Voices lab, The Finish Line Script Competition and more. Queens is in the top 2% of all discoverable projects on Coverfly and was on The Red List, while The Underground is in the top 3%. She was also selected for Coverfly Pitch week Fall 2021, and is a Coverfly endorsed writer. She has also been named as a finalist for the FilmLab TV 2022 Cohort where she is currently in a writers room led by former Paramount executive, Grant Rosenberg, developing an episode of TV for Williamette Writers.