Angela Wales Kirgo, the former executive director of the Writers Guild Foundation, has died in Sydney aged 78 following cancer. Her nearly two decades leading the charitable and educational arm of the Writers Guild of America West helped establish it as a major screenwriting institution, preserving writers’ work and widening access to the craft’s history.

Born in Sydney in 1948, Wales Kirgo became the Australian Writers’ Guild’s first executive director before moving to Los Angeles in 1990 and joining the Writers Guild Foundation in 1993. She oversaw the creation of the Shavelson-Webb Library, which holds more than 50,000 produced film and television scripts, increased the foundation’s fundraising more than tenfold, and expanded its oral-history archive and public events. After retiring in 2013, she published a memoir in 2019 and later returned to Australia.