PARIS BARCLAY | Writer, Director. Speaker on An Evening with Netflix

A preeminent force in television entertainment, Barclay has directed nearly 200 episodes of television and was active as a Director/Producer for series including: Station 19, Pitch, Sons of Anarchy, In Treatment, Cold Case, City of Angels and NYPD Blue. He also has directed episodes of a wide variety of series including Scandal, The Good Wife, Empire, House, NCIS: Los Angeles,CSI, Lost, The Shield, The West Wing and ER; as well as three films: the feature Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood; and the movies for television The Cherokee Kid and The Big Time. He earned two Emmy Awards and the DGA award for Outstanding Direction of a Drama Series for NYPD Blue, received six additional Emmy nominations for both producing and directing, and garnered ten other DGA Award nominations for shows as diverse as Glee, In Treatment, The West Wing, and House. He was inducted into the NAACP Image Awards Hall of Fame in 2014, and was made an Honorary Life Member of the Directors Guild in 2021, after serving two terms as its president.

A WGA member before he was a DGA member, Barclay co-created and wrote for the CBS series City of Angels with Nicholas Wootton and Steven Bochco, which ran for two years on the network. He co-wrote with James DeMonaco the Showtime pilot Hate, and has written other pilots for CBS and NBC. He wrote with Dustin Lance Black (on his first WGA-credited project) Pedro, a film about the life of Pedro Zamora for MTV, which received a Writers Guild nomination. As a playwright and composer, he has had musical dramas produced by Soho Rep, The Village Theatre, the Signature Theater, and the North Shore Music Theatre among others –including One Red Flower–adapted from soldiers letters written during the Vietnam War.

This fall, two episodes of each of three different series that Barclay directed will premiere: Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, The Watcher,and American Horror Story. Along with all of this, he is in post production on a feature documentary about Billy Preston, written with Cheo Hodari Coker.