Erin O’Connor, PhD, is best known as writer and producer of the award-winning 2019 film MISS VIRGINIA, starring Emmy® winner Uzo Aduba (ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK) and Golden Globe winner Matthew Modine (STRANGER THINGS, OPPENHEIMER). Called a “must-see” by USA Today, the film has aired on BET and Netflix. Today.com has recommended MISS VIRGINIA as a great film to watch on Mother’s Day. 

Erin’s other credits include the Webby-winning WE THE INTERNET TV and numerous documentary features and narrative shorts. Films she has worked on have received a wide range of awards, including the Berlin Crystal Bear, the Academy Nicholl Prize, the Oscar shortlist for documentary feature, and an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Short. She is co-founder of the Story Incubator Writing Lab, a nonprofit talent incubator and micro-think tank dedicated to healing our partisan divide through storytelling.

Before moving into film and television, Erin was a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where she specialized in narrative, the history of ideas, and cultural theory. Her book Raw Material: Producing Pathology in Victorian Culture has been called “a superb and provocative study,” “a tour de force,” and “one of the year’s most provocative and challenging books.”

Erin is currently developing several screenplays and writing a book on cruelty in the American workplace.