Bella Heesom

Bella Heesom is a playwright and screenwriter.

Most recently, she co-wrote the Amazon films, Your Fault London, and Our Fault London, the second and third titles in Prime Video’s Fault trilogy.

For television, Bella wrote an episode of Sex Education Season 4 for Netflix, and has projects in development with the BBC, NBCUniversal and Studio Lambert. She was selected for the BBC TV Drama Writers’ Programme 2020, during which she developed an original drama with Firebird Pictures for the BBC. Since then, she has worked with a range of leading production companies including Bad Wolf, The Ink Factory, The Forge, Sid Gentle Films, Happy Prince, Two Rivers Media and Mam Tor Productions. She has also written and performed in audio, writing an episode of the fiction podcast The People Outside.

As a brown, bisexual woman and mother, and the daughter of a Black, disabled, lesbian, Bella is especially drawn to stories that centre dramatically rich characters that have traditionally been marginalised.

Bella began her career as an actor. She studied Philosophy at the University of Cambridge before training at LAMDA, and has performed lead and ensemble roles across theatre, film and television. In 2016, she co-founded theatre company All About You with Olivier Award-winning director and dramaturg Donnacadh O’Briain. Her plays are published by Oberon Books.

Her debut play, My World Has Exploded A Little Bit, an autobiographical piece exploring grief, which mixes tender intimacy with philosophical debate and clownish silliness, premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2016 to critical acclaim, before touring nationally with Arts Council support. It was Highly Commended at the VAULT Festival Awards 2017, and led to a commissioned short film on grief for Stylist magazine, as well as a TEDx talk on vulnerability at Newnham College, Cambridge.

Her second play, Rejoicing At Her Wondrous Vulva The Young Woman Applauded Herself, is an unflinching exploration of female desire, navigating shame, pride and liberation. It premiered at Ovalhouse in 2019 in an Arts Council-supported run to strong critical response, including a four-star review from The Guardian, which praised “the glittering poetry in Heesom’s script, so vivid and visceral that sometimes the stagecraft feels redundant in comparison to the glory and guts of the words.”