Sean Gill, ACE, is a twice Primetime Emmy-nominated writer, playwright, filmmaker, and editor. He won Michigan Quarterly Review's 2020 Lawrence Prize (judged by Laura Kasischke, for the best annual fiction in MQR), Pleiades' 2019 Gail B. Crump Prize, The Cincinnati Review's 2018 Robert and Adele Schiff Award (judged by Michael Griffith), the 2017 River Styx Micro-Fiction Contest, and the 2016 Sonora Review Fiction Prize (judged by Molly Antopol). In 2021, he received the City Artists Corps Grant (from NYFA and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs). In 2023, he was awarded a Sozopol Seminars Fellowship in Bulgaria, presented by the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation.
His episodic TV work has won two Primetime Emmys, one Critics' Choice Award, and has been nominated for two GLAAD Media Awards, one MTV Movie + TV Award, and one Hollywood Critics Association Television Award.
His written works have also been published or are forthcoming in The Iowa Review, The Threepenny Review, McSweeney's, Electric Literature, ZYZZYVA, Five Points, BOMB Magazine, The Common, Carolina Quarterly, Evergreen Review, Fourteen Hills, Word Riot, Akashic Books, The Brooklyn Rail, Joyland, Columbia Journal, Barrelhouse, Hobart, The Offing, failbetter, Fiction Southeast, The Saturday Evening Post, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Hemingway Shorts: The Literary Journal of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation, and So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, among others. He currently writes the Lurid Esoterica column for Epiphany and the Six Authors in Search of a Character series at ZYZZYVA.
He was chosen as one of the winners of The Fiction Desk's 2017 Flash Fiction Competition and the 2018 and 2022 Lascaux Review Prizes in Flash Fiction. He was nominated for the 2015 storySouth Million Writers Award, and was chosen as a finalist for the Summer 2016 Glimmer Train Very Short Fiction Award, the 2016 Heavy Feather Review Story Prize (judged by Joanna Ruocco), the 2018 Bat City Review Short Prose Contest (judged by Antonio Ruiz-Camacho), the 2019 New Millennium Writings Award for Fiction, the 2019 New Letters Publication Award in Fiction, the 2020 CRAFT Flash Fiction Contest (judged by Leesa Cross-Smith), the 2021 Witness Magazine Award in Fiction, the 2021 A Public Space/Academy for Teachers "Stories Out of School" Contest (judged by Jonathan Lethem), and the 2023 Scottish Arts Trust Story Awards' Edinburgh Prize in Flash Fiction. He is currently at work on his first novel, an excerpt of which won the The Institute for the Novel's 2023 Novel Slices Competition.
Gill has edited a number of documentary and reality programs for Netflix, Paramount+, A&E, Bravo, Discovery, The Weather Channel, MGM, Roku, Martha Stewart, and the National Geographic channel, including Criminal Defense, which chronicled the efforts of public defenders from the Legal Aid Society in Brooklyn, New York; Transplant Team, which documented organ procurement coordinators at Mid-America Transplant in St. Louis, Missouri; 12 Hours With, a series of Billboard music documentaries for Hispanic Heritage Month 2021 spotlighting Maluma, Anitta, Mariah Angeliq, and Prince Royce; White House Christmas 2022, hosted by Zooey Deschanel and Dr. Jill Biden; What Drives You, the John Cena talk-series; and Netflix's Queer Eye. For his work on Queer Eye, he was nominated for 2022 and 2023 Primetime Emmys, as well as a 2022 American Cinema Editors (ACE) "Eddie" Award.
He was directed by Martin Scorsese in the pilot episode of HBO's Vinyl; worked as a bouncer for Public Enemy, Isaac Hayes, and Jefferson Starship; and was an artist-in-residence at the Bowery Poetry Club from 2011-2012.
He has written and co-written over a dozen plays produced in New York, including Aenigma, Laurie Deacon & the Night Caller, Stage Blood is Never Enough, and Dreams of the Clockmaker, which have been presented at venues and festivals such as La MaMa, The Wild Project, Dixon Place, The Collective Unconscious, Sticky, The Tank, Planet Connections Theatre Festivity, The Kraine Theater, The House of Yes, and Theater 80. His play The Show Runners was named a semifinalist by the 2016 Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's National Playwrights Conference.
He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Oberlin College with Highest Honors in Cinema Studies and the Comfort Starr Prize in History. A member of American Cinema Editors, the Television Academy, the Alliance of Documentary Editors, and the Dramatists Guild of America, he also studied under Juan-Luis Buñuel and is a graduate of Werner Herzog's 2010 Rogue Film School.
He has directed over thirty feature-length and short films including the Sleepy-Time Time cycle, Thursday Night, Girls Before Swine, Makin' a Martini, The Everlasting Vintage, and Laughter is the Music of the Gods. His work has been screened at venues as diverse as the Canadian Film Centre, the Oscar-qualifying Atlanta Film Festival, NewFilmmakers, the Coney Island Film Festival, the Lower East Side Film Festival, Spain's Bideodromo Bilbao, the Anthology Film Archives, Williamsburg Cinemas, Theater for the New City, Video Mass, Fargo Fantastic Film Festival, NYC Downtown Short Film Festival, at Purdue University Galleries, and aboard the Staten Island Ferry.