How to Get In: A Workshop with Director/Producer Paris Barclay

A pre-eminent force in television entertainment, Paris Barclay has directed nearly 200 episodes of television and was active as a Director/Producer for series including: Station 19, Pitch, Sons of Anarchy, In Treatment, Cold Case, City of Angels, and NYPD Blue. He also has directed episodes of a wide variety of series including Scandal, The Good Wife, Empire, House, NCIS: Los Angeles, CSI, Lost, The Shield, The West Wing and ER. He also directed three films: the feature Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood, and the movies for television The Cherokee Kid and The Big Time. He earned two Emmy Awards and the DGA award for Outstanding Direction of a Drama Series for NYPD Blue, received nine additional Emmy nominations for both producing and directing, and garnered ten other DGA Award nominations for shows as diverse as Glee, In Treatment, The West Wing, House, and most recently, Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. With that last nomination, he became one of only a handful of directors in Emmy history to receive nominations in every narrative category: drama, comedy, and limited series.

A DGA member since 1992, Barclay was the first African American and openly gay President in the Guild’s history. He was honored with the Robert B. Aldrich Achievement Award in 2007, which is given for providing extraordinary service to the DGA, and in 2021 was given the Honorary Life Member Award, the Guild’s highest honor for both service and career achievement. He currently serves as the Guild’s Secretary/Treasurer.

A WGA member before he was a DGA member, Barclay co-created and wrote for the CBS series City of Angels with Nicholas Wootton and Steven Bochco, which ran for two years on the network. He co-wrote with James DeMonaco the Showtime pilot Hate, and has written other pilots for CBS and NBC. He wrote with Dustin Lance Black (on his first WGA-credited project) Pedro, a film about the life of AIDS activist Pedro Zamora for MTV, which received Writers Guild and Humanitas Prize nominations. As a playwright and composer, he has had musical dramas produced by Soho Rep, The Village Theatre, the Signature Theater, and the North Shore Music Theatre among others – including Letters from ‘Nam (AKA One Red Flower), which was adapted from soldiers letters written during the Vietnam War.

Paris completed work on Doctor Odyssey in 2025 and shot two episodes of Season 3 of Shawn Ryan’s hit Netflix series The Night Agent, starring Gabriel Basso. He followed that up by directing Zachary Quinto’s twisty drama Brilliant Minds. In January of 2026, Paris helmed an episode of Dan Fogelman’s The Land, starring Chris Meloni, William H. Macy, and Mandy Moore. Paris’s first feature documentary Billy Preston: That’s the Way God Planned It is currently in its theatrical run. Paris co-wrote (with Cheo Hodari Coker) and directed the film, which explores the life of the iconic keyboard and recording artist Billy Preston. The documentary debuted at the New York City Film Forum and has now expanded to additional theaters in more than 30 cities across the US.

More information is available at www.parisbarclay.com.