Marie Macneill
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
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 CommitteeResearch 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
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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)
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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.
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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.
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Guthrie, Mark
(2014), THE DEAD SEA, (Published), Item availability may be restricted.
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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 |