Sean Burke develops original dramatic work for film, television, and the stage.
The projects differ in form and genre but share an interest in family, history, institutions, memory, and moral consequence.
The Girl Who Saw Wolves
Feature Film
A feature screenplay set in a remote Norwegian fishing village in 1975. A young Romanian woman arrives claiming she was followed from the forest by a wolf, and the village slowly builds an entire apparatus of protection around a danger no one can prove exists. As rumor hardens into accepted fact, the real threat from her past begins closing in. Part psychological thriller, part moral fable, the film explores fear, belief, institutional certainty, and the uneasy possibility that a story can be wrong about the facts and still right about the danger.
The Oz Deal
Feature Film / Limited Series
Set during the final closure of the Homestead steel mill in 1982, The Oz Deal interweaves that story with dramatized scenes from the 1892 Homestead Steel Strike. The two historical narratives move along separate arcs before converging at a shared dramatic apex, revealing the strike and the closure as opposite ends of the same continuing event.
The project explores labor, family, inheritance, industrial power, and the stories communities preserve as the institutions that shaped them disappear.
Television Limited Series
Original dramatic series exploring family, institutions, memory, and the lives people inherit.
Current projects include Black Cat, a multi-season original dramatic series in development.
Selected Plays
Cowboys Abroad: A Hobbyhorse Opera
Iowa City and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe
Belfast
Iowa Playwrights Workshop
City Seas
New York and German productions
Strike of ’92
New York productions
The History of John F. Kennedy, Part I
New York productions
Six Grand Guignol adaptations
Original one-acts exploring genre
Member Dramatists Guild of America