Kate Trefry

Kate Trefry is an American screenwriter and producer whose work has become central to the lore and development of the hit series Stranger Things. Born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska, she later attended New York University (NYU), where she earned a degree in English and developed her passion for screenwriting and storytelling. Early in her career she wrote feature-screenplay projects, two of which—Pure O and Revolver—made the coveted Hollywood “Black List” of best-unproduced scripts, highlighting her narrative ambition and recognition within the industry.

Trefry joined the writing team of Stranger Things in its second season, and over time she became a co-executive producer on the series. Her contributions helped shape not only individual episodes but the broader mythology of the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana. Concurrently, she explored a wider creative palette: she wrote the feature film Fear Street: Part Three – 1666 (2021), penned and directed the short film How to Be Alone (2019), and wrote the award-winning short Souls of Totality (2018).

In one of her most recent and ambitious undertakings, Trefry wrote the stage play Stranger Things: The First Shadow, a theatrical prequel to the series set in 1959 Hawkins. The project required her to translate the visual intensity and tone of the TV show into live theatre, which she described as a significant creative challenge. For drama students and theatre practitioners, her career offers a compelling example of how a writer can move between mediums—TV, film, stage—while retaining a distinct voice and expanding a narrative world across platforms. Her trajectory underscores the value of persistence, genre versatility, and the capacity to engage with both character-driven storytelling and expansive myth-building.