Tracy Held

My illustrious business partner and friend Megan Morrison and I recently had the incredible opportunity to showcase Erosion at Carnegie Mellon University’s Venture Bridge Demo Day. As Alumni founders participating in the VentureBridge Startup Incubator, we delved into the world of investment funding to pursue our mission of weaving conservation and climate change narratives into blockbuster films and TV shows.

The event was a celebration of innovation and entrepreneurial spirit, emphasizing the grit needed to tackle any challenge that comes our way–and the grit needed to “erode” obstacles to solving the climate crisis. We got to collaborate with a dozen other inspiring founders and met a large number of venture capital investors throughout the program. We’re eager to build on these learnings and new relationships to launch our first investment round next year.

Huzzah! My original pilot, Nature Organization, has advanced to the semi-finals of the Writing Climate: Pitchfest! Now all I have to do is polish it up for the final round.

Nature Organization is a live-action workplace comedy that chronicles the Executive Director of the struggling nonprofit Friends of the Local Parks, Theresa Chin, as she announces her first order of business: eliminating the office hierarchy. Although this sounds like a great idea at first, the human and animal staff fall apart without their beloved structure, and the newly-hired horse just wants to stop being stuck in the door.

Honored to announce that I’m a member of the inaugural Rideback Rise Circle cohort! Rideback Rise is an accelerator for BIPOC screenwriters to provide mentorship and collaborative opportunities with other participants.

In late summer 2022, my good friend and business partner Megan Morrison and I launched Erosion, a climate-conscious film production company dedicated to making blockbuster films and binge-worthy TV series using comedy, family-friendly musicals, and campy horror to sneak conservation themes into public discourse. We’re currently prepping fundraising efforts for our two web series and our upcoming feature film Hiking Buddies.

I’m thrilled to share this great Deadline article about The Scapegoat, an anthology limited series that I’m developing in collaboration with showrunner Barry Schkolnick and producer Brian Tee. This series is dedicated to exploring the harrowing stories of people who were unjustly accused of things they never did as a way of manipulating national conversations about everything from loyalty to country to feminism and even the AIDS crisis.

I’m honored to contribute to adapting the true story of Iva Toguri, a young Japanese American woman wrongfully convicted of treason for committing war crimes as the infamous radio propagandist “Tokyo Rose” during World War II. The series, exploring universal tales of resilience, is supported by the Japanese Americans Citizens League, a group of dedicated to shedding light on the injustices faced by Japanese Americans and bringing justice to Iva for her unconscionable treatment during and after the war.

This series will showcase the complicated moral choices making up our country’s history while humanizing the people who were wrongly vilified.

Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to be interviewed by VoyageLA! I got to share my journey from nonprofit marketing to theatre arts, culminating with the co-founding of Erosion.

I’m grateful to have had access to this platform to discuss the challenges of breaking new ground, finding collaborators who grasp the urgency of the climate crisis, and debuting my sassy headshot by writer/actor/photographer and picket-buddy Adam George Key.

My business partner Megan Morrison and I are very excited to announce that our conservation-driven film production company Erosion has been accepted into the VentureBridge startup investment incubator!

This program offers an initial investment, networking with other business founders and potential investors, and programming and other resources to support our development as entrepreneurs. We’re honored to be selected for this year’s cohort.

Last year, I got to participate in the Hollywood Climate Summit as a screenwriter promoting my feature Science Fair the Musical with the Climate Pitch Fest. This is a great group of people doing critical work to direct storytelling in media to highlight the most urgent challenge of our times. All of the programming will be live-streamed and some will be in person as well. A lot of screenwriting events are Thursday morning, and there will be Earth Sessions with workshops and activities engaging art, activism, and more. The movement to tell #climatestories is getting more urgent and this is a fun way to get involved.

In honor of AAPI Heritage Month, a number of groups coordinated picketing meet-ups to support the WGA Writers Strike. The strike is supporting by all film industry unions as a way of pushing back against the increased exploitation of writers and other creatives and crew. As Vice-Chair of the WGA West Asian American Writers Committee, I’m honored to be collaborating with so many advocates for writers.

I’m excited to announce that I’ve been elected to serve as the Vice-Chair of the Writers Guild of American West Asian American Writers Committee! As a multi-racial Chinese/Eastern European American writer, I’ve been extremely active in this committee since joining the Guild. The AAWC represents the professional and creative interests of Asian American writers in Hollywood. Asian American screenwriters are making great strides, but we still only make up 4.3% of screenwriters compared to 5.7% Asian Americans who live in the United States. It’s an honor to pursue this work with our new Chair, Kristina Woo.