2006 Spirit of Windrider Award Winner – Founder and Director of Act One, Barbara Nicolosi

Originally from Rhode Island, Barbara Nicolosi is the Founder and Chair of the Board of Act One, Inc., a nonprofit program to train and mentor Christians for careers as Hollywood writers and executives. She is a member of the WGA of America-West and has written several screenplays for various Hollywood production companies. Her most recent credit is as a co-writer with Benedict Fitzgerald (writer, The Passion of the Christ) on the upcoming Aloe Entertainment/MGM release, Mary: Mother of the Christ.

Barbara has a Masters in Film and Television from Northwestern University, and a B.A. from the Great Books program at Magdalen College in Warner, NH. She has been a script analyst, production company executive, and has consulted on scores of entertainment projects. Barbara has been a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts, a reader for the Humanitas Prize, a judge for the Angelus Awards Student Film Festival and has appeared as a cultural commentator on ABC, NBC, CBS, NPR and in the pages of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Premiere magazine. She has produced several award-winning plays at the Actors Co-op Theater in Hollywood, and is currently completing her first play based on the life of the poet Emily Dickinson.

Barbara is an adjunct professor of film at Pepperdine University and is a guest lecturer at the Los Angeles Film Study Center. She won Catholic Press Awards in 2001, and 2002 for her contributions to various Catholic magazines, and is the co-editor with Spencer Lewerenz of the Baker Books 2006 release, Behind the Screen: Hollywood Insiders on Faith and Culture.