Kaytie Nielsen – 2024 Pilot Finalist (Hour)
The Royal Aquarium
In Victorian London’s decadent underbelly, at a vast entertainment complex of ill repute, an ensemble cast of women from all walks of life chart deviant paths to make money on their own terms.
Kaytie Nielsen is a writer, filmmaker, historian, and community arts facilitator. She grew up near Fort Worth in a typical Texan family with a not so typical family business: a theatrical costume shop. Naturally, the whiplash between Rush Limbaugh on the radio and Dallas drag queens in her grandma’s fitting room raised some questions for a burgeoning young queer like her— questions that have continued to draw her to spicy characters and thorny histories.
After directing and producing unscripted films across four continents and learning how to say thank you in at least 12 languages, Kaytie landed in London and found home. There, she co-founded The USB Project, dedicated to turning up the volume on London’s underground music scene through live events, online content, and film. Funded by the Marshall Scholarship, she completed two Master’s degrees: one in History at Birkbeck, University of London and one in English Lit at UCL. (Yes, she is a gigantic nerd.)
Alongside Dr. Mame-Fatou Niang, Kaytie is the co-director of Mariannes Noires, a documentary on Afro-French womanhood broadcast on TV5Monde. As a community arts facilitator, Kaytie has produced grassroots cultural programming for the London Design Festival and the London Festival of Ideas, and she has received funding from Arts Council England and the Mayor of London for her work. She is an alumni of the Fulbright Summer Institute at Queen’s University Belfast where she studied histories of conflict and resolution, and as a Luce Scholar, she spent a year in New Delhi, India working for an independent production house as a cinematographer and editor. She was named a Finalist in the 2024 BlueCat TV Writing Competition and was longlisted for the 2020 BBC Comedy Script Room.
She writes about misfits, underground communities, and surprising places of healing. Her pilot, The Royal Aquarium, is an adaptation of the research she conducted for her Master’s in History.
You can follow The USB Project on Instagram at @usb.film.
Please find Kaytie at her website, www.kaytienielsen.com.