Born on a U.S. military base in Naples, Italy, Simon Luedtke moved to San Francisco when he was 14 days old. He grew up in Utah and Oregon, where he spent most of his days getting lost in the Rocky Moun tains and Evergreen Forests. He was introduced to writing by his father, whose poetry continues to inspire his work. By the time he reached high school, Simon had begun to use his writing as a form of play, developing his own escape rooms, live action role-playing games, and comedy sketches. In 2016, Simon headed for Boston to study acting at Emerson College. To everyone’s surprise (including his own), he came out four years later with a degree in journalism and a particular focus on environmental justice and harm reduction. While studying at Emerson, he joined a comedy sketch troupe and wrote his first full-length play, Toll Booth, about a isolated toll booth operator in Montana reckoning with his mother’s illness and his own confused manhood. The play was selected as a New Works Festival finalist. Simon also wrote the one act thriller Mary in the Mountains, partly inspired by the Rajneeshpuram cult, which follows a prisoner trying to convince a guard to free her, hours before her scheduled execution. After working for his local contact tracing team in 2020, Simon set his sights on grad school, heading down to Los Angeles to pursue an MFA in screenwriting at Loyola Marymount University. With a newfound curiosity in animation, he wrote Automaton about an aspiring inventor in Industrial Revolution-era England that must confront his Luddite father when he befriends a sentient robot. Simon is now writing multiple projects centered on native characters, including half-hour comedy pilot Red Rock about the 1969 Occupation of Alcatraz. He currently resides in Culver City with his pets that make him sneeze and fiancé that makes him smile.