Sony Pictures Television sets eight-strong Elevate class for 2026
Sony Pictures Television has named eight emerging creatives for its Elevate Writers & Directors Fellowship Class of 2026.
The studio confirmed the intake for the coming year, which spans two separate tracks for writers and directors. The full list was reported by Deadline.
Three writers were selected for the writing track alone. They are Luke Johnson, Melissa Long and Natasha Sabour.
Three directors were selected for the directing track alone. They are Chelsea Christer, Emily Kim and Sheridan O'Donnell.
The final two names sit across both tracks. Kelly Luu and Kevin Luu will participate in the Writers Fellowship and the Directors Fellowship in 2026, bringing each track to five participants and the total class to eight distinct fellows.
All eight will take part in curated programmes on the Sony lot in Culver City. That is the studio's main production base in California, where soundstages, writers' rooms and editing facilities sit side by side.
A fellowship is not a series order. It does not put a show on a schedule or guarantee a pilot, the test episode a network or platform may shoot before deciding to proceed. It is earlier in the chain. Writers develop scripts and take meetings. Directors shadow on set and prepare to helm episodes of existing series.
What makes this stand out is the overlap at the centre of the list. Luu and Luu will work across both disciplines through the year. That is a wide brief. Writing and directing call on different muscles, different schedules and different rooms.
For viewers, the effect is indirect but real. Television runs on crews of more than a hundred people and on writers' rooms where stories are broken, rewritten and finished. New names enter that system through schemes like this. Some go on to staff jobs, meaning fixed places in a series writers' room. Others go on to direct episodes. Audiences meet their work much later, when a credit appears on screen.
Sony Pictures Television has run Elevate as its in-house route for that first step. The 2026 class will do its work on the lot, close to active productions. The 2026 group brings the two crafts together in one intake.
