Sally Fenaux Barleycorn

Sally Fenaux Barleycorn started to work in international film and TV productions in 2009. Working on TV series sets for Sky TV, commercials for Coca-Cola or American Express, and movies like Cloud Atlas (2012) became her film school. She started in the costume department, briefly worked in production, to then moved on to become an assistant director with the purpose to learn directly from internationally acclaimed directors while at the same time starting to develop her own work as a writer/director.

Sally received funding from the Amsterdam Funds for the Arts (AFK) for her first science fiction short film, “Skinhearts,” shot in Amsterdam (The Netherlands) in 2014. She has since then directed dozens of short films independently or for clients. In 2019, Sally was commissioned to write and direct a short film for the first edition of the Arts and Activism Festival in London (UK). The film, titled “Unburied,” went into festivals and screenings all around the world, winning the Silver Award at the Social Justice Film Festival in Seattle (USA) and being exhibited as part of the “Against Race” exhibition in PhotoEspaña 2021.

As the only professional female screenwriter and director of color that Sally has been for a long time in Spain, she always saw all of her career advancements as an opportunity to lead the way to other creators from traditionally discriminated backgrounds. With that objective in mind, she started working as a diversity consultant for companies and organizations in the film industry as well as for film & TV projects, nurturing a more inclusive perspective. She is also the co-founder of Black Seed Films, an educational platform for the professionalization of BIPOC creators and a successful mentor that has accompanied winning short film projects and web series from the first stages of writing to completion.

In 2021, Sally co-wrote and directed her first feature film for Else Cinema. That same year, she was also selected at the UGC Writers Campus with her sci-fi TV Show “The Originals,” which is still in development like another of her TV show concepts “Space Trash.”

At the moment, Sally is exploring other narrative formats like fiction podcasts and comics while still working as a script reader and developing feature projects in English for a Senegalese production company.