Valentine’s Lunch & Learn: Writing Sex Scenes

Consent and boundary knowledge can help you find evermore nuance and subtlety in your communication.

It gives more options, expands structure, and can even open up space for creativity.

In our fourth-annual Valentine’s Day Lunch & Learn, Intimacy Coordinator Katherine O’Keefe, will go over some common mistakes and stereotypes in intimate scenes, how to approach them in a way that cares for the actors (your coworkers), and how to avoid tropes.

We will discuss assault scenes as well. Then we’ll cover consent frameworks so we can share a common vocabulary and can have nuanced and intuitive conversations about consent and boundaries, both for actors and for characters.

We will watch some scenes and discuss them through this lens.

About the facilitator

Katherine O’Keefe came to intimacy coordinator work with a robust background working in production. She has extensive experience as an intimacy coordinator, having worked on more than thirty productions as an IC. Some of her recent credits include working as the intimacy coordinator on Daisy Jones & the Six (Amazon), Mrs. Davis (Apple TV+), Pam & Tommy (Hulu) The L Word Generation Q (Showtime) and Vida (Starz). She specializes in intimacy in comedy, having intimacy coordinated comedies such Rutherford Falls, I Love That For You, That 90s Show, and many others.  Katherine has also spent much of her career focused on LGBTQ representation on screen and has taught numerous masterclasses on writing sex for the screen (Stephen’s College, Stonybrook University).