Shawn Ku, recently moved from the US to Amsterdam is a fantastic writer-director with wide ranging experience. Shawn’s feature directorial debut Beautiful Boy (which he also co-wrote) garnered him Toronto International Film Festival’s prestigious FIPRESCI Prize and Giffoni International Film Festival’s Gryphon Award for Best Film. Other directorial credits include A Score to Settle, starring Nicolas Cage, Lifetime Television’s “Seeds Of Yesterday” (the last installment of the acclaimed “Flowers In The Attic” Series), MTV’s “The American Mall” (for which Shawn received a DGA Award nomination), Crackle’s web series “Sequestered” (IAWTV Award nominee for which he was both director and Executive Producer/showrunner) and his cult favorite short film Pretty Dead Girl – a musical necromance (which premiered at the Sundance International Film Festival and went on to the Tribeca International Film Festival, the Florida Film Festival where it won the Jury Award for Inspired Filmmaking, and many other festivals around the world). Note this was before “Glee” and the more recent obsession with musicals.Pretty Dead Girl is currently being developed into a full-length stage musical production with Tony Award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang.

As a writer, Shawn returned to the Tribeca International Film Festival with his screenplay White and Rice for which he won the Tribeca All Access Creative Promise Award Honorable Mention. He co-wrote the screenplay Feel The Beat (Netflix, 2020) and was developing a sequel to Feel the Beat at Netflix until they dissolved their family division.  As an actor, Shawn won an AFI FEST Jury Prize for his performance in the internationally acclaimed feature Samsara (which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on 9/11). Prior to his career in film, he performed on Broadway in the Tony Award-winning productions of Miss Saigon, The King and I and Fosse. 

Shawn earned his MFA in Film Production from the University of Southern California and his undergraduate Chemistry degree from Harvard University.