About Jill
Jill is originally from East Meadow, NY. She has traveled and lived all over the world and is fluent in Spanish, French and Italian. She is the CEO of the nonprofit organization Create Now, which she founded in 1996. Jill has devoted the last 23 years of her life helping more than 48,000 at-risk and high-risk youth in Los Angeles to heal and thrive through therapeutic programs in the arts.
She is a produced screenwriter, having adapted the book Hit and Run by James Hadley Chase into the screenplay Rigged, which stars George Kennedy. This film was distributed internationally by Kodiak Films. She also wrote The Immortals, a PBS pilot that stars Ed Asner as Socrates. Several of her original screenplays were optioned.
Jill's script Gangsta Love (co-written with incarcerated youth) was a finalist in the Creative Screenwriting/Unique Voices competition and is currently a Quarter-Finalist in the Screencraft contest. Her screenplay Kids Rule placed as a Semi-Finalist in six different writing competitions, and also as a Finalist in an international writing contest.
BOOKS
MENTOR YOUTH NOW
A Guidebook for Transforming Young Lives (Nonfiction) This is a one-of-a-kind book that covers all aspects of mentoring, from the basics to setting boundaries, teaching life skills and how to end a mentoring relationship.
ADVENTURES WITH THE ANCIENT CRYSTAL SKULLS
I cowrote this inspirational memoir with Joky ("YOH kee") Van Dieten from the Netherlands. As a child, she witnessed her mother confronting Nazis. oky was the first female Ferrari racecar driver in Europe.
DOLPHIN HEALING
A 10-year-old girl fighting cancer is inspired to live through her love for a dolphin. She becomes the leader of a movement in her small town to save dolphins from tuna nets used by the greedy owner of a local fishery where her mother works.