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Celeste Escalera is an entertainment finance professional and award-winning screenwriter who works fluently on both sides of the camera. Over more than 20 years in production accounting, she has served as a freelance key accountant across major studios and streamers - including Netflix, NBCUniversal, and Disney - on productions such as The Fall Guy, Fast X, The Gray Man, The Decameron, Black Barbie, and Reservation Dogs, building financial frameworks that scale from studio tentpoles to micro-budget independent films across three continents.
As a screenwriter, she has earned 15+ international honors across six original projects, including a Gold Screenplay Award at the Seoul International AI Film Festival for The A-I "Lies" Within, a psychological thriller exploring AI, obsession, and digital identity, and a Best Short Script win at Indie Short Fest (Los Angeles International Short Film Festival) for The Seed Between Worlds and Stars, a metaphysical drama about cosmic memory and belonging that also earned an Honorable Mention at the New York Screenwriting Awards. Her scripts are known for merging cultural realism and psychological depth, drawing on more than 15 years of immersion in Korean, Japanese, and Chinese film and television alongside an instinct for North American streaming audiences.
She wrote Budget:Zero, Constellations:Borrowed, a short film recognized as a Quarter-Finalist in the Creative Screenwriting Short Screenplay Competition (2026) and Semi-Finalist at Indie Short Fest, now in pre-production under a SAG-AFTRA Micro-Budget Project Agreement she secured and administered independently, self-funded and volunteer-crewed from the ground up. Alongside her own producing work, she is also active on the financing side of independent film - building pitch decks, budget comparables, and financing packages, and helping arrange meetings between productions and prospective investors and studio partners to move projects from packaged concept toward funded production. She has also designed production-finance training for Netflix's global freelance accountant network and speaks on film budgeting and financing, including at the Film Finance San Diego workshop.
Escalera brings a rare dual fluency to the industry: the institutional financial discipline of a veteran production accountant paired with a storyteller's instinct for what makes a project worth financing in the first place.
