Saturday Night Live has announced their new additions to the writing team for the upcomnig 42nd Season of the late-night sketch show. According to Splitsider, Anna Drezen, Kristen Bartlett, Joanna Bradley, Zack Bornstein, Julio Torres, Brian McElhaney, and Nick Kocher are now all in the mix.
The show has been very active this off-season releasing three cast members, promoting writers, and now adding even more. We wouldn’t be surprised if the show has quite a new feel this year. Let’s take a look at all the new additions just announced.
Anna Drezen
Anna Drezen is an actor, comedian, and writer living in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been featured on MTVu, the front page of CollegeHumor, Funny or Die, WitStream, Thought Catalog, Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, and SplitSider. She has performed at Joe’s Pub, the PIT, the UCB, the Del Close Comedy Festival, the Women in Comedy Festival, and many other festivals, clubs and colleges across the city and country. She graduated with a BFA in Acting from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she studied under Michael Potts, Ted Sluberski, Ruben Polendo, and Theresa McCarthy, among others. Anna received a certificate in Shakespeare in Performance from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, UK, and completed the Advanced Improv course of study at the UCB in NYC.
Kristen Bartlett
Kristen Bartlett is a New York City-based writer and performer. Her show The Dead Dads Club performed to sold out audiences at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York and at special engagements in Los Angeles and Montreal. The show was featured in Paste Magazine, Modern Loss, the Village Voice, LAist, and on The Best Show with Tom Scharpling. She is a writer for the UCB show Night Late and UCB Digital team Frohnson & Frohnson. She also wrote for Maude teams Mama’s Gotta Go and Goodbye Handsome. She has appeared in Netflix Presents: The Characters with Natasha Rothwell, Adult Swim’s We’re Newbridge, and the second season of Hulu’s Difficult People. Bartlett hosted and co-created Poor Comedians In A Car Getting Coffee. She is a founding member of the sketch team Bridge & Tunnel, which performs monthly at the People’s Improv Theater.
Zack Bornstein
Bornstein is a former Segment Director at Jimmy Kimmel Live. He also was the creator of Garlic Jackson Comedy, is a writer at UCB Theater, and Host of 1000 Comics To See Before You Die. He has directed, written, produced, and performed original comedy for ABC, Comedy Central, FOX, MTV, The New Yorker, and more. Birthed in Seattle, he studied Neuroscience at Brown University and was selected as a Rhodes Scholar Finalist.
Julio Torres
Julio Torres is a Brooklyn-based comedian and self-proclaimed Space Prince. His abilities have been put to use at the Chris Gethard Show, Billy on the Street and most recently Saturday Night Live as a guest writer. He was named a New Face of the Montreal Comedy Festival, a Comedy Central Comic to Watch and a finalist for Standup NBC. The New York Times has called him “avant-guarde,” “intriguing,” but most importantly: “young.” It is hard to say where Julio first appeared, but some say it was in El Salvador before moving to New York to go to The New School.
Nick Kocher
Nick Kocher is a writer and performer originally from Atlanta, Georgia. After learning to walk, speak, and take tests he moved to New York, where he attended NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts studying acting at the Stella Adler Studio and the Experimental Theater Wing. He had a pretty good time. In 2008, he and fellow Atlanta buddy Brian McElhaney joined forces to form a sketch comedy duo called BriTANicK. Under the BriTANicK name, they’ve put out a series of internet videos that have amassed over 25 million views worldwide and received praise from Gary Oldman, Adam McKay, Roger Ebert and Joss Whedon. Their sketch ‘Academy Award Winning Movie Trailer’ was nominated for ‘Best Viral Original’ at the 2011 Comedy Awards. BriTANicK has also run several live sketch shows at UCB, including 2009’s “The Infinity Prison” which was voted ‘Best Sketch Show of the Year’ by Time Out New York. They have performed live at various colleges across the country as well as at the Chicago, New York, and SF Sketchfests and the Chicago Just For Laughs Festival. In 2010, Nick co-wrote and starred in the short film Eagles Are Turning People Into Horses, which went on to be screened at the Slamdance Film Festival and South By Southwest. The film is super weird and you can watch it online. He has appeared in several TV shows and movies including Louie, I Just Want My Pants Back, The Colbert Report, Searching For Sonny and Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing. He also starred in the ABC pilot Awesometown .
Brian McElhaney
Brian McElhaney is a machine that quickly and easily separates cotton fibers from their seeds, allowing for much greater productivity than manual cotton separation. The fibers are processed into clothing or other cotton goods, and any undamaged seeds may be used to grow more cotton or to produce cottonseed oil and meal. He was created by American inventor Eli Whitney in 1793, and patented in 1794. He uses a combination of a wire screen and small wire hooks to pull the cotton through, while brushes continuously removed the loose cotton lint to prevent jams. This is a true story. See Nick Kocher for BriTANick bio.
Joanna Bradley
Bradley is a writer and performer who lives and writes and performs in New York City, where she is a living performer/writer. She is a staff writer at Lorne Michaels’ Above Average. Bradley has appeared on 30 Rock, Broad City, High Maintenance, Horace & Pete and was a cast member on VH1′s Best Week Ever. Bradley plays every Saturday night on UCB improv team GOAT. She’s written and starred in two solo shows, I Am Very Important Poeple, in 2014 and Everybody’s Dumb and Boring, in 2011-2012, both of which ran at UCBNY and UCBLA. A “solo show” is another way of saying “one-woman show,” but Joanna only says “one-woman show” when she is menstruating.
