About

Kelsey Maurine Brickl is a New York City-based historian, cross-form writer, disability-access analyst, and live comic performer whose work examines how power, belief, reputation, and institutions turn coercion into common sense.

Her writing spans screenplays, fiction, criticism, longform nonfiction, Holocaust historiography, disability rights, theatre, cultural analysis, and live comic performance. Across forms, her work is marked by narrative precision, moral pressure, historical consciousness, dark humor, and a sustained interest in the unstable border between public narrative and private truth.

She writes at The Times of Israel Blogs on history, law, public memory, Holocaust restitution, disability rights, and institutional accountability, and publishes essays and cultural criticism on Substack and Medium. Recent Medium essays, including The Reputational Economy of Male Harm and Stoic Adaptation in Disabled Travel, were selected for boosting.

Her portfolio includes the completed feature screenplay The Book of Loretta, the pilot There Are No Comets Seen, published fiction, public essays, theatre criticism, and live sit-down comedy. She performs in New York City: observational, unsentimental, high-register absurdism through the lens of feminine Disability.

Brickl is also the Founder & Director of Accessible France and the founder of Bespoke Vows. Her work across ventures reflects the same core strengths visible in her writing: narrative precision, cultural fluency, structural analysis, and a serious engagement with how language shapes experience.

Originally from the Chicago area, she has also lived in Indiana, Wisconsin, Texas, and France, and that movement between places continues to shape her engagement with history, language, culture, and belonging.

Current projects include Hardtack, a historical drama set in western Kentucky at the edge of the Civil War. Centered on a working-class girl and the two boys who have been her whole world, it is a story of labor, war, class, reputation, and the catastrophic cost of necessity.

She will attend Cannes Lions 2026 from June 22–26 and is available for editorial, development, adaptation, consulting, and narrative strategy conversations.

For editorial, representation, producing, adaptation, consulting, speaking, or access-analysis inquiries, please get in touch.