About

Ally Burnham is an AWGIE-winning screenwriter and NIDA graduate (2016, Masters, Writing for Performance) who works as a freelance screenwriter, script editor and author, under her business name Faucet Fictions. She is represented by Elizabeth Troyuer & Associates.

She is best known for her feature film Unsound (2020), which was nominated for best original feature at the 2020 AWGIE awards. A romantic-drama, the film won best Australian feature at the 2020 Melbourne Queer Film Festival, best fiction feature film at the 2020 ATOM Awards, and was nominated for best indie feature at the 2020 AACTA awards, and Best Oceania Film at the 2022 Septimius Awards.

Ally also writes as a novelist. Her debut novel, Swallow, is set for release November 2025. Swallow is a pirate historical fiction based on a true story from Australian history. An early draft of the manuscript was longlisted for the 2022 Page Turner awards.

Ally is the lead writer for Metropius (AcropolisWorld), a multi-media franchise produced by 18 Degrees. In 2019 the project received funding from Screen Queensland, and her screenplay for the animation won Most Outstanding Animation at the 2022 AWGIE Awards. In 2021 project was awarded the Epic Games' Epic Megagrants to expand into comics, an AR experience and a board game.

The first and second issues of her comic book, Forgotten Rose, based in the world of Metropius, are out now.

Further collaborating with 18 Degrees, Ally shares a writing credit on the comedy-heist feature film, Nice Package (2016).

Writing for television, Ally has collaborated on projects for CJZ, and assisted on projects for Essential Media and Blackfella Films in 2017. In 2016, developing for CJZ, Sweet Jane, was a recipient of Screen Australia’s Gender Matters initiative.

In 2014, Ally graduated from Griffith Film School with a Bachelor in Film and Screen Media, specialising as an on-set AD and script supervisor. For her graduate work, Ally wrote and directed the short, 2.0. The film celebrated a fruitful festival run, appearing in competition at seven international film festivals.

In 2013, Ally won the Australian-wide young filmmaker’s competition, ‘The Shoot’, hosted by Baz Luhrmann, NIDA and Samsung. Her short film, The Pilgrim Report, premiered at the Sydney Opera House during its 40th Anniversary Celebrations.

She is also the Creative Producer at Westwords - Western Sydney's Centre for Writing. As a part of this work, she endevours to foster and share the voices of Western Sydney, and to diversify and elevate Australian literature.

Ally features regularly at writing festivals, hosting cross-media and writing talks and workshops. Past events have included the Art Gallery of NSW, the Writing NSW Speculative Fiction Festival, Sydney Supanova, the 2023 HNSA Conference, Sydney's first SXSW Conference, and was a guest curator for 10th anniversary of the Rose Scott Women Writers' Festival.

Speculative fiction is also a large part of her writing. In 2020 she received a residency fellowship from Varuna House for the development of her fantasy manuscript, Majesty. In 2021 she was accepted into the Westwords Academy for development of the same project.

Ally is a part of the writing collective and indie publisher Precipice Fiction. Together they released the fantasy, sci-fi & horror short story anthology The New Mythic in December 2022, of which Ally is a contributing editor, and author, with the fantasy novella The Stolen Sword. The New Mythic was nominated for two Aurealis Awards in 2022.

Precipice Fiction also drops fortnightly podcast episodes called Prose & Cons. It is a podcast by emerging writers, for emerging writers.

Three of her fantasy short stories, Suns of the Division, Feeder and Clipped, have been published by Quill and Read, and online magazine.

Other writing acknowledgments include the long list for the AWG Prime Time program (TV), and the semi-finals of the Screencraft Thriller and Action screenplay competition. In 2021, her short film, Saving Daylight premiered in competition at the Flickerfest Film festival.

When there is time, she also teaches at NIDA Open, course designing and training school-aged and adult students in screenwriting for film and television.