About

Lori Twichell is a screenwriter, marketer, publicist, and theatrical distribution consultant who has worked every stage of the entertainment pipeline, from before a single word hits the page all the way through to the experience for the audience sitting in a theater or streaming at home. In this industry, that gives her a unique perspective and experience that raises the level of quality in every project she touches.

She started in radio, writing commercials for advertisers at a small Pennsylvania station before moving to on-air talent and eventually Promotions Director at a larger metropolitan market. Her campaigns caught the attention of nationally recognized brands, and she built a reputation for creative, audience driven strategy that got results.

That reputation followed her into film. Brought on as a volunteer for the original Left Behind feature, Lori quickly outperformed the publicity firm already on the job and was moved into a full-time role. She went on to manage grassroots publicity, giveaways, and promotional campaigns across more than 2,500 radio stations nationwide. With this experience, she pioneered engagement-driven marketing well before social media existed.

Her background as a writer led her into long-form storytelling, including serving as one of the head writers for the internationally syndicated audio drama Down Gilead Lane, which aired weekly on thousands of stations worldwide across multiple seasons.

In 2006, Lori founded Beyond the Buzz Marketing, where she has led campaigns for Nike, Lifetime, The CW, ABC Family, and multiple NBC television shows. Through her ownership of two influential book review platforms, she became a recognized voice in both mainstream and specialty publishing markets and was sought out by bestselling authors including Nora Roberts, Sophie Kinsella, and Ted Dekker for reviews and endorsements. That publishing credibility led naturally into adaptation work, where she developed a specialty in translating novels to screen with clarity and respect for the source material, while working within the practical demands of production.

In 2014, she wrote and developed the original feature film A Horse Tale, distributed by Lionsgate, which went on to earn hundreds of positive audience reviews across major streaming platforms.

Shortly after production wrapped, Lori was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer that required major surgery to remove a large portion of her tongue, followed by chemotherapy, radiation, and thirteen surgeries over a single summer. She didn’t speak or eat for nearly a year. Her doctors weren’t sure she ever would again and they were certain that even if she did, a significant speech impediment would prevent her from working professionally. No one told Lori any of this until after she had already worked her way back to speaking with no detectable impairment.

Her first job post-recovery was working group ticket sales for a top box office theatrical release which meant ten to twelve hours a day on the phone with churches and organizations across the country. No one she spoke with knew that only months earlier, she hadn’t been able to say a word. Since then, Lori has overseen group sales and audience engagement strategies for dozens of national theatrical releases and expanded into full theatrical distribution consulting.

But the thread that runs underneath all of it, the one that shaped how Lori thinks about audiences, started not in a marketing meeting, but on a military base close enough to see the damage on September 11, 2001. Isolated, unable to leave, watching the world come apart, she began to understand something that day about what stories can do for people when everything else fails. Though Lori had always viewed the world from a personal place of asking how she can help and what people might need, on that day she started thinking of it in a bigger way.

For more than 25 years, Lori has volunteered her time supporting service members and their families, and helping to build entertainment libraries at Brook Army Medical Center, Walter Reed, and Bethesda Naval Medical Center, arranging celebrity visits to hospitalized troops, and producing content that honors their stories. She learned in those hospital hallways what it means to truly know your audience, not as a demographic, but as people with specific needs, specific limits, and an extraordinary capacity for loyalty when someone shows up for them with genuine respect. That work has been covered in TV Guide, USA Today, and other national publications, and brought her into collaboration with the Jim Henson Company, SyFy, NBC, and others. She also helped create and launch Brush of Honor, one of the first original series for the INSP network, focused on Gold Star Families.

That larger, more nuanced understanding of audience is the foundation of what Lori now calls Convergence Campaigns: a proprietary approach to film marketing and distribution that connects a story’s themes to the communities already living them. She developed it in 2020. The industry is still catching up to Lori’s innovative ideas.

Lori travels nationally to speak and teach on screenwriting, marketing, publishing, and rebuilding a career from the ground up. She brings the same thing to every room she walks into: the full view of how this industry actually works, and a genuine investment in helping others navigate it.