Senior Lecturer

Initially, Marie worked as an actress after training for three years at the Royal Central School of Speech & Drama. She has appeared in theatre and on TV, radio and film. She was artistic director of the touring theatre company Bedside Manners for 16 years, producing 45 original shows from Scotland to Cornwall, via the West End. Marie has written extensively for theatre (30 plays and musicals produced), film and television. In 1999 she was nominated for the TAPS (Television Arts Performance Showcase) writer of the year award for her Cornish sitcom St Hoggen.

Other television work includes 11 episodes of The Tribe (Cloud 9, Channel 5, and broadcast world-wide) Revelations (Cloud 9, Channel 5); she was commissioned to write two drama series for the BBC and a 12 part drama series for S4C. Marie has been commissioned to write five feature films and has had one feature optioned. In 2010 her low budget supernatural horror, The Dark Side, was selected to be part of the Cross Channel Film Lab development scheme in Brittany and Cornwall. In 2014 she worked on a zombie horror film, The Dead Sea. As a director and/or producer Marie has worked on over 75 shows for a variety of theatre companies and numerous short films. She has worked extensively as a script editor for Cornwall Film; UK Film Council; Kent Hothouse and Screen South; and many individual writers. Marie judges for the Celtic Media Festival, is a BAFTA voter and on the committee for the Royal Television Society (Devon & Cornwall). For many years she was on the Executive Council for the Writers' Guild of Great Britain. She has written two novels - Swimming in the Rain, set in Penwith, and Strawberry Moon, set in Carrick (Falmouth). She was nominated for her short Katbottys (Catgut), directed by Jeremy Williams, Celtic Media Festival 2019. She worked with filmmaker Orson Cornick on To Whom It May Concern; produced award-winning The Day of the Coyote for director Derek Hayes; script editor for Chris Morris' Cornish short - Kestav (Celtic Media Festival award winner). In February 2020, Marie and actor John Macneill's company Mundic Nation toured the one-man theatre play, The Coastguard, which she wrote and directed. In July 2024 she completed The Hag Stone (writer and director) which has inspired the feature-length film script Three Storms. Both projects are part of her ongoing research into En Plein Air writing and Beachcombing For Stories (she presents a paper on this at the Screenwriters Research Network Conference in September 2024). She has recently written the book for a large-scale musical; and is currently working with Sneh Gupta from Jodhpur, Rajasthan on a new film project. Marie presented a paper at Falmouth University's Haunted Landscapes Conference in 2023 which led to working as co-editor with Joanne Ella Parsons on the June 2024 publication 13 Cornish Ghost Stories.

Marie's teaching at Falmouth University has included a number of extra-curricular storytelling and filmmaking projects including Spilling The Beans, where students created, wrote and made a mini-TV series from scratch; The Collaboration - the School of Film and Television working with AMATA actors to make television; My Talking Head - new monologues performed by AMATA actors. Marie has been nominated for Staff/Teaching Excellence Awards four times and has won twice.

External Links

Macneill

Contact details

Telephone 01326 259228

Qualifications

Honors and awards

Year Description
2019

Nomination Celtic Media Festival

2017

Teaching Excellent Award. Falmouth University

2016

Katie Fforde Bursary Winner

2011

Teaching Excellence Award. Falmouth University.

Membership of external committees

Royal Television Society. Devon and Cornwall Committee

Research Interests

Research interests and expertise

Storytelling; Screenwriting; Script Editing; Script Mentoring; Script Consultancy; Producing; Directing Actors; Collaboration; loss - loneliness - grief - inequality.

Marie will be presenting her paper at the Screenwriters Research Network conference in Vienna in September 2022, entitled, In Search of Mermaids: is there universality in screenwriting and storytelling? Current exploration and practice includes Beachcombing for Stories - working with students beside the sea to inspire and create.

Her chapter: Constructing Criticism without Crushing Confidence: Cultures of Feedback in Television Script Development was published in The Palgrave Handbook of Script Development in January 2022.

Her paper -The Meddle of the Muddle: How many captains does it take to steer a story and whose course is it anyway? - was presented at the Screenwriters Research Conference in Porto 2020.

Research Topics

  • Blue Mind
  • Film
  • Finding Stories in the Landscape and the Sea
  • Grief
  • Playwriting
  • Screenwriting
  • Storytelling
  • Television drama

Research Outputs

Publications and research outputs

  • Macneill, Marie

    (2022), THE COASTGUARD BY MARIE MACNEILL - audio recording, In: Recording of The Coastguard, 2021/2022, Chatterbox Audio
  • Macneill, Marie

    (2019), THE COASTGUARD, In: THE COASTGAURD, From 20th February 2020, AMATA; The Old Library, Bodmin;The Acorn Penzance; The Old Bakery, Truro; St Gluvias Church Hall, Penryn; more to follow, (Published)
  • Macneill, Marie

    (2021), THE PALGRAVE HANDBOOK OF SCRIPT DEVELOPMENT. Chapter: Constructing Criticism without Crushing Confidence: cultures of feedback in television script development, In: THE PALGRAVE HANDBOOK OF SCRIPT DEVELOPMENT, Palgrave/ Macmillan, Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021, pp. 135-146, ISBN: ISBN 978-3-030-82233-0 ISBN 978-3-030-82234-7 (eBook), Item availability may be restricted.
  • Macneill, Marie

    (2019), The Meddle of the Muddle: How many captains does it take to steer a story and whose course is it anyway?, In: Screenwriters Research Network 2019, 12th -14th September 2019, PENRYN CAMPUS, (Published), Item availability may be restricted.
  • Guthrie, Mark

    (2014), THE DEAD SEA, (Published), Item availability may be restricted.
  • Hayes, Derek

    (2023), The Day Of The Coyote, SoFT

Teaching

Areas of teaching

  • Film; Television; Drama; Screenwriting; Producing; Directing

Courses taught

  • Television & Film Production BA(Hons)
  • BA(Hons) Film

Policy engagement within Cornwall

Engagement with organisations which contribute to the development of educational, cultural or socio-economic policies in Cornwall

Penryn Community Theatre (roles have included Producer, Writer, Director and Committee), Second Thursday (organiser for Writers' Guild of Great Britain meeting in Cornwall), Reader for the Nick Darke Awards.

Business Engagement

Intellectual property

Verity - screenplay - feature film
Strawberry Moon - novel 
Swimming in the Rain - novel
The Coastguard - theatre play
Katbottys (Catgut) - short film 

Business engagement case studies

BFI-Futures

Consultancy and facility services

Script consultancy and script editing for film, TV, radio and theatre 

Professional Engagement

Independent professional practice

During 2020-21 Marie was involved in a year-long project for the BBC Writersroom Cornish Voices, where she wrote the pilot for. 6-part TV drama series set in Cornwall called End of The Line.

Professional esteem indicators

Year Description
2020

National Judge Celtic Media Awards

2018

International and National Judge Celtic Media Festival

2017

Teaching Excellence Award. Falmouth University

2017

National Judge and International Judge Celtic Media Festival

2016

National Judge Celtic Media Festival

2016

Katie Fforde Bursary Winner

2011

Teaching Excellence Award. Falmouth University