Kaitlin McLaughlin is an award-winning writer/director. Her debut feature POCHA (MANIFEST DESTINY) premiered at the 2015 Los Angeles Film Festival, winning both the Audience Award and a special jury prize in directing. POCHA, which she wrote and co-directed, was also awarded three post-production grants at the 2014 FICG in LA Construye, a works-in-progress competition hosted by the Guadalajara International Film Festival. In 2016, Kaitlin will direct her screenplay THE MURPHYS, which received the 2011 Showtime Tony Cox Award for Best Screenplay from the Nantucket Film Festival and was a semi-finalist in the 2012 Austin Film Festival’s screenwriting competition. She has also participated in the Screenwriters Colony Writers-in-Residence Program and Film Independent’s Screenwriters Lab.

Kaitlin was born into a large, borderline clannish Irish-Catholic family and raised in Boston, Massachusetts.  She suffered through three Yankees championships before graduating with honors from New York University’s Tisch School for the Arts.  Now based in Los Angeles, Kaitlin returns home frequently at the behest of her relatives, who can’t understand why she would ever leave in the first place.