I don’t know much about life, but I know I believe in beauty, love, and laughter.
I believe in the strength of people and the power of imagination.
I believe in truth; I believe in empathy; I believe in independence.
I believe in you, and I believe in me, and most of all, I believe in us.

Aileen Sheedy graduated magna cum laude from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, with a B.S. in both Computer Science and Electronic Media, Arts & Communication. Throughout college, she was heavily involved in the campus radio station, WRPI, as both a DJ and a member of the executive committee.

After returning home to Portland, Oregon, Aileen worked as a software quality assurance engineer at Harmonic before deciding to start a media production company, Pencil Ink Productions. She is currently the videographer for PlayWrite, a non-profit that empowers at-risk youth through theater; previously, she was the video producer at the literary non-profit Late Night Library. She enjoys mentoring students through a program called Film Connection and has also taught therapeutic filmmaking workshops for veterans with I Was There, a program of the Patton Veterans Project. When not producing her own projects, Aileen frequently works as an assistant director and script supervisor in the local film industry, as well as a quality control specialist for MedBridge Education‘s online courses.

Aileen has written and directed short films across various genres, from science-fiction thrillers to raunchy romantic comedies to experimental tone poems, but her work always focuses on themes of identity and relationships. Several of her films have won cash prizes at competitions, including RPI’s McKinney Writing Contest and the “It’s Your Town” Filmmaking Competition sponsored by New Amsterdam Vodka. Her most recent short, “The Legend of Stella,” premiered at the Oregon Short Film Festival in 2020, where it was nominated for Best Comedy film, and won Best LARP/Cosplay Film at GeekFest Toronto in 2021. Aileen received a Make|Learn|Build grant from the Regional Arts & Culture Council for post-production on her short “Astrophe.”

In 2015, Aileen created, produced, and directed a 40-episode multimedia web series called The Misselthwaite Archives, which adapts the classic novel The Secret Garden into a modern coming-of-age story. The show currently has over 100,000 views on YouTube and has been nominated for the Oregon Actor Awards, the Portland Indie Short Film Awards, and the Literary-Inspired Webseries Awards. #MisselArch, as it came to be known by fans, also had high levels of audience engagement on Twitter and Tumblr while it aired.

Aileen is currently writing the screenplay for her first feature film, a relationship drama about the search for happiness. Other projects in development include a web series based on The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens; a half-hour comedy pilot set in a college radio station; a collaborative, improvisational short film about middle-aged roommates; and an episodic audio drama told entirely through walkie talkie conversations. In her spare time, Aileen also experiments with poetry and interactive fiction.