McKenzie Chinn
About
McKenzie Chinn is a writer, director, and actor based in Chicago. Driven by a revolutionary sensibility, her work uses vivid imagery, rich language, and an intimate lens to explore complex characters and stories of personal transformation and liberation.
She is a 2023 SFFILM Rainin Grant Fellow, and a 2021 Sundance Screenwriters and Directors Lab Fellow with her feature, A Real One, currently in development. The short film and proof-of-concept of A Real One won the Gold Hugo for Live Action Short Film at the 2023 Chicago International Film Festival, long-listing the film for Academy Award consideration, and won the Grand Prize at the 2024 Midwest Film Festival.
Her 2018 indie feature Olympia (writer, producer) won the audience award at Geena Davis’s Bentonville Film Festival, after which she became the inaugural recipient of the festival’s See It, Be It Filmmaker Grant via NBCUniversal. She was named IFA Chicago’s inaugural Breakthrough Voice Award recipient in 2022, and received a 2023 Black Excellence award for her poetry music video First You Need A Body.
As an actor, her on-camera credits include recurring and guest star roles on the FOX series The Big Leap, ABC's Will Trent, CBS’s The Red Line, and others. Onstage she has worked with Yale Repertory Theatre, Steppenwolf Theatre, Goodman Theatre, The Second City, Woolly Mammoth, The Studio Theatre, Congo Square, and others. She made her stage directing debut with ALAIYO at Chicago’s Definition Theatre.
She holds an MFA from The Theatre School at DePaul.
