Mao Natori was born and raised near Mt. Fuji in Japan. She grew up watching many films with her family, such as ’80s and ’90s Hollywood movies and Ghibli animations.

In art school, Mao made a few short films using her plants, insects, puppets, and slugs. Her quirky insect and slug movies received such a mixed response that she gave up on pursuing her dream of making the world a happier place through art and film. Instead, she spent most of her 20s and 30s dedicated to nonprofits and working at a hospital as an ICU nurse.

The challenges of working as an ICU nurse, experiencing and seeing so much life and death, affected Mao physically and mentally and led her to consider what regrets she may have if she were to die today. She realized she wanted to return to her original dream and make slugs a star. She prepared to study screenwriting and filmmaking in America and eventually resigned from her job and studied abroad at the New York Film Academy in Los Angeles from 2019 to 2020.

While writing her first bilingual feature, SLUG FEST, in LA, the COVID-19 pandemic began and made it difficult to finish her script. She was forced to give up her dream yet again and returned to Japan where she worked as a quarantine nurse at Tokyo’s Narita International Airport. Four years later, Mao finally finished her screenplay and SLUG FEST reached the final stage in Stage 32 Feature Drama Screenwriting Competition. Her passion is to write genre-bending, original stories for a better world, and she currently focuses on screenwriting.

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