Akela Cooper
Biography
Akela Cooper is an American screenwriter and television producer. She is notable as the screenwriter of horror films, such as Hell Fest (2018), Malignant (2021), M3GAN (2022), The Nun II (2023), and M3GAN 2.0 (2025). Cooper was named to Variety's 10 Screenwriters to Watch for 2021 list.
Cooper was raised in Hayti, Missouri. She graduated from Truman State University with a degree in creative writing in 2003 and received her MFA from the USC School of Cinema-Television, where she was the first recipient of the NAACP/CBS Writer's Fellowship.
Cooper was a staff writer for Grimm for two seasons and went on to be a writer and co-producer for The 100, American Horror Story, Luke Cage, Jupiter's Legacy, Witches of East End, and Chambers. She wrote the horror film Malignant, released in September 2021.
She is the screenwriter of the upcoming sequel to the horror film The Nun, as well as the 2022 horror film M3GAN and its sequel. Cooper was announced as the showrunner for the upcoming HBO Max television adaptation of the novel Monster by A. Lee Martinez.
