Rachel Werbel
Rachel is a creative who loves a spreadsheet with a nearly lifelong passion and interest in environmental conservation. She is thrilled to be able to work with Green Spark Group and support the entertainment industry's movement to carbon neutrality and responsible resource management.
Thanks to early education in earth sciences at The LBI Foundation for The Arts & Sciences Marine Biology day camp – she learned that science is cool, nature is awesome, and humans can wreak havoc on the ecosystem when they don't pay attention to their actions. Rachel’s teachers taught her to learn about the natural world, reflect on the changes we cause in our environment, have respect, make considered choices, and speak up. By spending time in nature with experts Rachel was educated on the effects of mismanagement and misuse of pesticides and herbicides in our backyards. Her teachers noted every osprey nest they saw and spoke about how the population was endangered due to the widespread use of DDT decades earlier. They noted the plastic waste and the little gobs or tar (remnants of oil spills) washed onto the coastline. And they observed the decline in the horseshoe crab population year to year. What 9-year-old could forget being read the prologue of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring after spending the morning in a marsh teeming with fiddler crabs and birds.
Rachel has worked in the arts off and on for two decades from off-off-broadway theater to film and TV. While a student she worked at The Green Table, one of the first farm-to-table restaurants in NYC. She saw what a company could do when sustainability and environmental stewardship were an integral part of a business and every employee was trained on the tactics implemented.
Rachel’s first feature screenplay Bear Spray and Cake was a 2021 BlueCat Screenplay Competition Finalist. Chicken Story, an experimental narrative short screened at The 2021 Athens International Film and Video Festival and received an honorable mention from The 2021 Experimental Forum. Rachel collaborated in the writing and development of the web series Run For Your Life which screened at TV/Web festivals worldwide and has over 7 million views. Rachel’s first short film Clutter (a story that involves textile recycling) was selected for The New School's student film festival Fine Cuts; it received an award in creative screenwriting. In 2014, her screenplay Bearspray was selected for The New School's yearly live reading event.