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Shondaland was heavy in the house at SeriesFest, an immersive annual five-day festival in Denver, Colorado, devoted to celebrating television and the brilliant minds who make it. Now in its 10th year, SeriesFest showed a lot of love to Shondaland, a longtime supporter of the conference, with a big honor for executive producer Betsy Beers, as well as a very cool mentorship award to up-and-coming director Shelby Blake Bartelstein, who’ll now get to visit the set of an undisclosed Shondaland show to shadow a director.

Pitch-a-Thon Presented by SeriesFest
Friday, June 14 at 3:30 p.m. / Fermentation Hall at The Momentary
Five filmmakers with selections at the 2024 Bentonville Film Festival will participate in an exclusive live pitch session with top television, new media and digital professionals in hopes of moving their projects – and careers – forward. Panelists include Lisa Ann Walter (Actor/Producer/Comic), Sarah Minnie (Head of Artist Development + Production, OTV), Erich C. Smith (Agent, TCA), Elias Plagianos (Writer/Director), and moderator Claire Taylor (Director of Programming, SeriesFest). Filmmakers pitching include Sylvester Folks, Set Hernandez, Cynthia Kao, Liann Kaye and Gabriella Moses.

Ashley Michel Hoban serves as the showrunner of ‘Dr. Death’ on Peacock, and we had the opportunity to speak with her about season two of the show, before its release in December of 2023. As luck would have it, Ashley was in attendance at SeriesFest this year for a pair of panels, giving us the opportunity and honor of speaking with Ashley again, to follow-up with her regarding the show, now that season two is on the airwaves.

Shelby Blake Bartelstein jokes that she’s a “recovering actor” whose “gateway drug” was musicals in junior high. Her passions have served her well, though: The Chicago native went from the theater to applying that same spunky, eccentric outlook to commercials for some of the world’s biggest brands. One of her projects, “I Can’t Wait to Wash My Face: The Musical!,” from Olay, went viral and made its TV debut on the 2018 MTV VMAs.