If you’ve spent the past few days bingeing The Body, you’ll want to know who to thank. Step forward Quinn Shephard, the writer, director and showrunner who has given us Catholic schoolgirls, a dance-team initiation gone to hell and one of the most openly sapphic things Netflix has put out in a long time (other than The Hunting Wives, of course).
She’s 31, she’s been on screen since she was a child, and she now has a Catholic campaign group petitioning Netflix to pull her show. Here’s everything you need to know about her.
Who is Quinn Shephard?
Quinn Shephard is an American writer, director and actor from Metuchen, New Jersey. She started acting as a child, then moved behind the camera with Blame (2017), a film she wrote, directed, edited and starred in. When the money fell through in the first week of shooting, she paid for part of it with her own college fund.
It premiered at Tribeca when she was 22, making her the youngest female director to debut a film at the festival, and later earned her and her mum a Film Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best First Screenplay.
She followed it with Not Okay (2022), an influencer satire starring Zoey Deutch and Dylan O’Brien, and the Emmy-nominated Hulu series Under the Bridge (2024), which gave us Lily Gladstone as a queer cop opposite Riley Keough. Keough is back as an executive producer on The Body.
Is Quinn Shephard a lesbian?
Yes, and she’s been loud and proud about it while promoting The Body. Raised Catholic, she has talked about being a confused teenager who worried that being queer would mean losing her femininity. Looking back on trying to come out, she told Netflix’s Tudum she remembers asking herself: “Am I going to have to be butch?”
She started writing The Body at 20 or 21, the same year she was realising she was queer and coming out for the first time. She told The Cut a lot of it grew out of conversations with her ex, the first girl she ever dated, about femininity and girlhood. These days, she says, being queer has made her more feminine, not less. And in the most lesbian twist possible, that ex has seen the show and was invited to the premiere. As Shephard told The Cut: “We’re so lesbian. We’re like best friends.”
She’s not shy about how queer the finished show is, either. With so many queer women working on it, she told PinkNews its tone is “so inherently like lesbian camp and a lesbian sense of humour”.
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Does Quinn Shephard have a girlfriend?
Shephard keeps her love life fairly private. She was in a long-term relationship with actor Nadia Alexander, who she met in 2015 when Alexander starred opposite her in Blame (Alexander went on to win Best Actress at Tribeca for it). Alexander proposed on the last day of shooting Not Okay, and the pair were engaged.
They’ve since gone their separate ways, and Shephard isn’t married and hasn’t publicly named a new partner.
How old is Quinn Shephard?
Quinn Shephard is 31. She was born on 28 February 1995 in New Jersey.
Who are Quinn Shephard’s parents?
Shephard’s mum is Laurie Shephard, a former actor turned producer. She encouraged a teenage Quinn to use writing as an outlet, then produced Blame with her and shares the story credit (and that Spirit Award nomination) on the film.
What is The Body about?
It’s Halloween 2004, and the Lions, the badly behaved dance squad at a Catholic girls’ school, take part in an initiation ritual that goes horribly wrong. Afterwards, the girls start having prophetic visions, and mass hysteria spreads through their town. All eight episodes landed on Netflix on 11 November 2026.
Shephard runs the show alongside co-showrunner Gina Gammell, and calls it a love letter to the ’90s and Y2K teen movies and erotic thrillers she grew up on. Think Carrie, Jennifer’s Body, Bring It On and Mean Girls, with a heavy dose of The Crucible, which she was fixated on at 15 (her first film, Blame, is about a girl who gets far too intense about a school production of it, and yes, she’s said it was autobiographical).
The cast includes Kristina Bogic as Anya, Sara Boustany as Elise and Geena Meszaros as Lisbeth, alongside Sofia Wylie, Louisa Krause, Nnamdi Asomugha and Gabby Windey as the girls’ dance coach, Coach Miller.
Is The Body based on a true story?
No, it’s fiction, so don’t go looking for the real Lions. But it’s personal. Shephard has called it her most personal project yet, and she and Gammell dug into their own high school years to ground it. Anya’s confusion about what she’s feeling for Elise is lifted pretty directly from Shephard’s own teens.
She also told Variety she was tired of TV where everyone is instantly fine with a character being gay: “I wanted to make a very unsanitised, messy first queer love story.”
Quinn Shephard movies and TV shows
As an actor:
- Unaccompanied Minors (2006)
- Hostages (2013), as Morgan Sanders
- The Blacklist (2013)
- Person of Interest (2014-2015), as hacker Claire Mahoney
- Blame (2017), as Abigail Grey
- Midnight Sun (2018)
- The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018), as Coley Taylor, Cameron’s love interest
As a writer and director:
- Blame (2017)
- Not Okay (2022)
- Under the Bridge (2024)
- The Body (2026), which she also created and showruns
Why do Catholic groups want The Body cancelled?
Before the show had even aired, the conservative Catholic site LifeSiteNews launched a petition demanding Netflix cancel it, calling it blasphemous and anti-Catholic. They object to the show’s priest, its take on the Mass and a satanic ritual, plus an All Saints’ Day post from Netflix styling the five leads as mock saints. Their write-up also made a point of describing Shephard as “a lesbian”, in case anyone was wondering what the real problem was.
Fans have hit back with a petition of their own, launched on premiere day, asking Netflix to renew The Body for a second season. Netflix hasn’t confirmed one yet, but Shephard has already teased that a season two would be even queerer.
Is The Body worth watching?
Our review – yes, 100%. Sapphics agree with us, and the rest of the critics are mostly on our side, with the show opening at 83% with critics and 98% with audiences on Rotten Tomatoes. We’ve rounded up the reviews and what sapphic fans are saying in our full review roundup.
All eight episodes of The Body are streaming on Netflix now.
Enjoy,
Nonchalant x
Your next read: The Body on Netflix: the reviews, the Rotten Tomatoes score and what sapphic fans are saying
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This article was written by one of our creative team writers here at Nonchalant Magazine.
