The Georgia Jeffries Papers consist of scripts and related production ephemera from a variety of TV series and movies, both produced and unproduced. A small part of the collection contains papers and media related to Jeffries’ awards and professional involvement.

Georgia Jeffries is a writer for television and feature films. Born in the Midwest, she was raised in Peoria, Illinois and the San Francisco Bay Area. After graduating from UCLA cum laude, she began her career as a journalist for American Film, the magazine of the American Film Institute. Her first feature screenplay, Nobody’s Fool, won the Gold Award at the Houston International Film Festival. She began working in television when she was hired as a story editor on the hit ground-breaking series Cagney & Lacey. During her three seasons as a writer-producer, she was the first individual woman to win the Writers Guild Award for Episodic Drama in 1985 and 1987, as well as being nominated for two Emmys and the Humanitas Prize. In the 1990s Jeffries served as Supervising Producer of the Peabody Award winning China Beach drama series where she also earned Emmy and Humanitas Prize nominations for her teleplays then went on to write as well as produce both Sisters and New York News. As an Executive Producer/Writer, she developed numerous original pilots, movies and book adaptations for ABC, CBS, NBC, USA/Universal, Lifetime, Showtime and HBO. In 2009 she received the Women’s International Film & Television Showcase Screenwriter of the Year Award for her body of work. Appointed to the faculty of the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts in 2003, she is a tenured professor and former Chair of the TV Curriculum Committee. She created the Writing Division’s first drama pilot class in addition to launching the first undergraduate television thesis at an American university. She also teaches MFA drama thesis and received the Graduate Student Council Appreciation Award. She has guest lectured at the American Film Institute, Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, Paley Center for Media, Humanitas Institute Master Writers Seminars, the Banff International Television Festival, the Melbourne National Screenwriting Conference, Australian Film Institute and Bouchercon, the international mystery writers conference in Toronto. She was selected for a Leighton Artists residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts to write a novel inspired by The Good Soldier, her original unproduced HBO docudrama. Jeffries is a past vice-president of both Women in Film and PEN USA West. She also served on the Writers Guild Foundation Board of Trustees for two decades. She has been a judge for the PEN Teleplay Awards, the WGA Awards, as well as the annual Voice Awards which recognize film and television that educates the public about mental health, addiction and recovery. In 2021 she was interviewed in the Showtime documentary, Buried, about her work producing the controversial 1992 NBC MOW, Fatal Memories.

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