[ James Morgan ]

Monique Sorgen was raised in an international hippie house in the Castro district of San Francisco by her dad-- a civil rights attorney with no personal boundaries-- and her mom-- an immigrant and UC Berkeley French professor, who met him protesting. Using her "joyfully cynical" voice, Monique attempts to live up to her activist parents’ efforts to improve the world by making comedies that use humor to move the needle on society’s major malfunctions. She is particularly passionate about using comedy to reframe a woman’s place in the world.

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Her most recent “message comedies,” which have been crowd pleasers at over 60 festivals and won multiple awards, can be explored on the homepage of this website. Her films have allowed her to enjoy fellowships in the Sony Pictures Television Diverse Directing Program, BlackMagic Collective’s Filmmaker Advancement Initiative, and Alliance of Women Directors’ Directing the Actor Lab; and given her the privilege of directing such legendary actors as M. Emmet Walsh, Ronny Cox, and Wallace Langham, rising superstars like Reid Miller, Mo McRae, and Cress Williams, as well as supremely underrated talents like Jessica Oyelowo, Reiko Aylesworth, Zainab Johnson, Sandra Saad, and Kelly Vrooman, to name a few of the amazing women she’s collaborated with. She started in Theater, so she loves working with actors.

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She built her storytelling skills directing narrative music videos, multiple seasons of unscripted television, and during her career as a screenwriter, where she worked on TV shows (including for the Brazilian and Indian markets), and feature films with DiNovi, Imagine, Morgan Freeman's Revelations, and David Oyelowo's Yoruba Saxon, among many others. In the indie film world, she wrote a Chinese remake of “Love Stinks,” which was produced in Shanghai, although she wrote it in Hong Kong, and she has worked as a script consultant with many producers, including Mike Gabrawy of Arclight films, and Chris Moore of “Good Will Hunting” and Project Greenlight fame. She even had a staff position in a development think tank at a network (ABC), where she only fell more in love with working in show business.

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Currently, she has two short films and a television pilot on the festival circuit, with past and future screenings listed at the bottom of this page.​

Her debut novel, “How Long You Should Wait to Have Sex” is available on Amazon in English, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and French; and her one-act play "Gaslighting" is available at Next Stage Press.