Cameron's Welcomes Visual Artist Samuel Leighton Dore to the Agency for Screen & Literary Representation
Cameron’s is pleased to welcome acclaimed visual artist, Samuel Leighton Dore, to the agency for screen and literary representation.
Samuel is a writer, screenwriter, director and visual artist based on the Gold Coast, where he lives with his production designer husband and two cats.
His book How To Be A Big Strong Man (Smith Street/Simon & Schuster 2019) brought some much-needed accessibility and humour to topics of masculinity and mental health, with Benjamin Law writing: "If toxic masculinity is a virus, then the big-hearted, happily subversive, technicolour-hug that is Samuel Leighton-Dore’s art is surely the antidote.” Samuel has explored these themes at great length, particularly as experienced by members of the LGBTIQ+ community, across his multifaceted creative practice, winning Visual Artist of the Year at the 2019 Honour Awards and producing work for organisations including Equality Australia, ACON, Twenty10, ReachOut and, most recently, writing and producing a series of short animations for men’s health organisation Man Cave.
Starring Lucas Pittaway from Snowtown, Samuel’s short film Showboy (prod. Diana Burnett, 2014) won Best Short at the Melbourne Queer Film Festival in 2015, before screening in competition at Sydney Film Festival and The Iris Prize in Wales.
In his early 20s Samuel published an e-book of essays about dating called Love, or Something Like It (Thought Catalog 2014), which went to number 1 on Amazon’s Love and Relationships chart. Continuing on the topic of dating, he interviewed philosopher Alain de Botton about the trappings of romanticism in 2016. Samuel contributed an essay, The Watering Hole, to Benjamin Law’s Growing Up Queer In Australia anthology (Black Inc Books 2019) and won The Moth StorySlam in 2018, later coming runner-up in the annual GrandSlam storytelling event.
He directed a short documentary about the challenges of dating for people with an intellectual disability called The Dateables (Metro Screen 2015) which inspired two feature stories on the same subject by 730 on ABC and has appeared in short documentaries about mental health for both ABC (My Body Says) and SBS.
He has developed a significant following through his distinctly vulnerable autobiographical writing for publications including SBS Pride, SBS Voices, Pedestrian TV, Junkee, Buzzfeed, Hello Mr, and Attitude magazine.
His first animated TV comedy series Willy is currently in development with Brisbane-based animation studio Like A Photon Creative and Mad Ones Films. His production company Sad Man Studio focuses on aligning with mental health and LGBTIQ+ organisations to produce animated stories with heart and humour, while actively developing grassroots comedy concepts with creatives including sketch comedy duo Freudian Nip (The Feed, SBS) and US social media comedy actor Benito Skinner.
Samuel is currently working on a semi-autobiographical graphic memoir called Meet You In The Middle, which tells a two-sided love story through the framework of a couple’s respective therapy sessions, as well as a non-fiction book on mental health called Broken Brains and Growing Pains.
For screen enquiries regarding Samuel Leighton Dore, please contact James Ward via email or on (02) 9319 7199.
For literary enquiries regarding Samuel Leighton Dore, please contact Chelsea Thistlewaite via email or on (02) 9319 7199.
