“SHE WANTED TO MAKE SURE WE WERE ACTIVELY ENGAGING OUR MINDS’’

attended Barnard College in New York, majoring in journalism. She later studied film at USC. After graduating she worked for Anderson Cooper at his daytime talk show, which ran for two seasons. Working with director Cary Fukunaga in Africa on the film Beasts of No Nation proved to be quite an adventure, trekking through the Ghanaian jungle, whacking the brush with machetes and coming down with malaria. However, the experience cemented her love of filmmaking, spurring her to enroll at USC for her MFA.

Film Festival Award, Nick Bilton, Projects in Development

Her documentary The Queen’s New Clothes won the audience award at the Dallas International Film Festival in 2019. It chronicles the life of Winn Morton, the gay costume designer who turned the pageant into something “magical and sparkly and fantastical,” in a conservative town.

With the journalist Nick Bilton, Ashley is producing two projects about the social media app Twitter for Netflix. Yes, the projects were in the works before the Elon Musk era, but the timing is certainly opportune. She’s also developing a scripted series about young women working in politics in DC, and she has been working on a project with her husband, a scriptwriter. P