Nickolas Duarte is a writer, director, and creator. He is the Chief Creative Officer of Crown Chimp.
His scripted and documentary work has been distributed by Sony Pictures Television, selected as Vimeo Staff Picks, recognized by the Webby Awards, and screened at Academy Award-qualifying festivals. He is a multiple NALIP fellowship recipient, a National Endowment for the Arts recipient, and a fellow of the Ryan Murphy HALF Initiative. He previously co-created and wrote a crime series for Warner Bros.
Over the past fifteen years, Duarte has written and directed hundreds of narrative, documentary, commercial, and branded projects for companies including Netflix, Adidas, Nike, the NBA, BMW, Coca-Cola, and Google. His work has received Emmy and national ADDY and Telly recognition, among 100+ other industry awards.
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Duarte’s work is rooted in the Sonoran Desert, where family, class, violence, faith, desire, and identity collide with folklore and the uncanny. He writes soft people in hard worlds, moving between humanist noir, regional American gothic, and Sonoran mythic realism, with an eye toward humor, tenderness, and strange beauty amid violence and struggle.
His current projects include Desert People, a one-hour family crime drama set in a mythic Arizona border town; Guillotine, an ensemble drama set inside the world of MMA; Sonoran Gothic, an antholoy of supernatural desert stories; Patina, a crime noir; and Mammoth, a science-fiction thriller about faith, trauma, and contact.