Mike Roe
Cohort: 2025 - 2026
Website
About
Mike Roe is a Los Angeles writer working across screenwriting, journalism, and live comedy, with a focus on mixed-race and Native Hawaiian identity, faith interacting with doubt, and the people mainstream storytelling overlooks. He's the author of The 30 Rock Book (Abrams), an award-winning journalist whose newsroom homes have included LAist/KPCC and TheWrap, and a longtime member of the L.A. sketch and improv community. He's written a shelf of TV pilots about people wrestling with power, belief, and belonging, writing both solo and with his wife, Kristiana. Mike believes stories can help people see forward and find hope in dark times. He lives in Burbank.
Resilient Artist Projects
Restoration
In "Restoration," two strangers — a hairstylist running on anxiety and a satellite radio ad salesman running on denial — wait out evacuation during Altadena's Eaton Fire in a Red Cross shelter. As the night unravels what each of them has been holding onto, they offer one another the small kindnesses available to strangers: a phone charger, a granola bar, the truth. Written by Mike Roe with contributions by Nicole Gabriella Scipione, who performs the scene with him. It asks what restoration looks like when what's lost can't simply be rebuilt, and how tragedy can help us see one another.
"Surrender in Empire," a litany, is a communal prayer for the moments when those who hold power and the structures they dominate fail us. It is a call to make Love our resistance.
The Lighter Weight of Being is the culminating multimedia and interactive event for the 2025 - 2026 Resilient Artist cohort.
