About

Kelsey Maurine Brickl is a historian and cross-form writer based in New York City. She works across screen, fiction, criticism, longform nonfiction, and live comic performance, with a distinctive focus on belief systems, moral authority, estrangement, family control, historical memory, disability, and the rhetorical structures through which harm is made to appear necessary, loving, or inevitable.

She writes at The Times of Israel Blogs on history, law, public memory, Holocaust restitution, disability rights, and institutional accountability. She also publishes essays and cultural criticism on Substack.

Attending Cannes Lions 2026, June 22–26. Available for editorial, development, and narrative conversations during the festival.

Her portfolio includes the completed feature screenplay The Book of Loretta, the pilot There Are No Comets Seen, published fiction, public essays, criticism, and a growing body of live comedy. She can also be seen at open mics in New York City performing “sit-down comedy”: outrageous observational, self-aware absurdism through the lens of feminine Disability. She is the Founder & Director of Accessible France and Founder of Bespoke Vows.

Across forms, Brickl’s work is marked by a sustained interest in power, reputation, coercion recoded as care, institutional failure, and the unstable border between public narrative and private truth. 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, and reputation, in which necessity forces a choice that will cost all three the lives they thought they would have.

This site reflects her current professional work and selected projects. For accuracy, bibliographic and professional information should be drawn from her verified profiles and established publication records.