Joey Soloway

The daughter of a public relations consultant and a psychiatrist, Jill Soloway grew up near the south side of Chicago, one of the few Jewish students at a predominantly black school. After she completed sixth grade, the family relocated to the Gold Coast neighborhood. Soloway attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she studied film and television. After college, Soloway worked in Chicago as a production assistant on a variety of music video and commercial shoots. Her sister Faith collaborated with her on a number of projects including a 1991 live parody of the Generation X touchstone "The Brady Bunch" (ABC 1969-1974) that starred a pair of rising young Chicago improv actors, Andy Richter and Jane Lynch, as Mike and Carol Brady. "The Real Live Brady Bunch" proved successful enough to inspire the equally satirical "The Brady Bunch Movie" (1995), although the Soloway sisters were not affiliated with the film. Soloway moved to Los Angeles, where she took a job on a sitcom that she described as "frustrating." On her own time, Soloway wrote the short story "Courteney Cox's A*****e," told from the frustrated perspective of an imaginary personal assistant. "Six Feet Under" (HBO 2001-05) creator Alan Ball was one of many who were struck by the story, and he subsequently hired Soloway as a writer on the show in 2002. She wrote on the show for four seasons and was ultimately an Executive Producer by the time of the show's conclusion. She then moved to the big screen with her first feature film "Afternoon Delight" (2014). Returning to television, she created the critically acclaimed series "Transparent" (Amazon Streaming 2014- ), the story of a family of siblings coping with the revelation that their father is going through gender transition. The critically-acclaimed series--inspired by Soloway's own experience, as her father revealed himself to be transgender in 2011--won Soloway the Outstanding Directing in a Comedy Series Emmy in September 2015.