COMMUNITY
OUR STORIES
Dana
Braziel-Solovy
TV Writer
A former Chicago punk rocker, Dana Braziel-Solovy knows how to rebel and promises only to do so for good. By creating feminist comedy and dramedy television shows, she fights the patriarchy with nothing but her computer keyboard. She calls it, "QWERTY Hurty."
Having grown up with a suicidal mother, Dana knows the importance of safe forms of escapism. Her writing seeks to cure pain through laughter and uses magical realism to examine the human condition. Dana's first foray, a comic book mini-series, landed her on the Diamond indie bestsellers list twice.
To support her compulsive writing habits, Dana works as a television Art Director with credits on shows such as CSI: VEGAS and WANDAVISION.
Denise Cruz-Castino
Television/Film
Denise Cruz-Castino has sold a live action short to Disney, her first feature 5 Weddings premiered at Cannes in 2018 and will play worldwide September 21, 2018. Her horror short was produced by Raving Eejit Entertainment, and her short, Things Look Grim, was produced by Sasha Golberg.
She’s currently writing and co-producing a WWII movie with Academy Award-winning producer Kim Magnuson and Neil Machlis. Her blog that helps newbie screenwriters, screenwriterwriting.blogspot, was named Website of the Week by Script Magazine. Her scripts have placed in Final Draft Big Break, Fade-In Screenwriting and Nicholl’s Fellowship contests.
Katy Farzanrad
Screenwriter
Katy Farzanrad is an Iranian-American chick producer, writer, and mother of two. With an MFA in Cinema and TV from USC and the student loans to prove it, Katy pays her bills by producing unscripted television for numerous outlets, including TLC, FYI, WEtv, and OWN, among others.
As a writer/producer, Katy is always in pursuit of a good story. Her feature documentary, Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary, placed in film festivals such as CPH:DOX Copenhagen, DOC NYC, and the Starz-Denver Film Festival.
Gilda Hauser
Porcari
Screenwriter
If Gilda's life were a movie it would be called “Miss Goodie Too Shoes” and the logline would be…After her sociopathic husband almost kills her, an anxiety-ridden perfectionist from a crazy, chaotic family embarks on a quest to find a stable, conventional lifestyle, real love and her place in the world." She primarily writes grounded half-hour comedy and one-hour dramedies, and is expanding into romantic comedies.
A former stand-up comedian and improve actor, Gilda was a semi-finalist in the 2022 Austin Film Festival, won the Chicago Screenplay awards, third place winner int he 2021 Scriptapalooza one hour drama original pilot, and has reached the quarterfinals in Screencraft Comedy, Genre and Inroad Fellowship over the last year. A former marketing and fundraising exec, Gilda's "day job" is as a professional voicover actor. She's a doting "Nonna", a proud Aunt and has been happily married for seven years to an Italian patent attorney who keeps threatening to be her writing partner. They recently relocated to Miami from Detroit.
Julia Bergeron
Screenwriter
Julia Bergeron is an LA-based writer-director obsessed with telling stories about people forced to answer the question, “What would you do for family?” As the mom of a bio and an adopted kid, to her “family” means adoptive, step, found, and traditional. It’s all family to her!
Phil Traill is set to direct her feature screenplay “Austen Time.” Her feature film, “Murder Van” (writer, co-producer) is in post and will premiere in August of 2023. She has written and directed 2 shorts, and won 3 festivals. Her other screenplays have finaled in AFF, Page, ScreenCraft, and Shore contests.
Lena Parodi
Screenwriter
Lena first realized she wanted to be a storyteller when she was three years old and “fresh off the plane” from Italy.
Since then, she's managed to tame the three languages in her head while obtaining a B.F.A. in Dramatic Writing, a B.A. in Journalism, and a Minor in Spanish from New York University. Lena has written and directed shorts for The Cinequest Film Festival, transcribed and organized footage for several in-development documentaries for Beau Willimon’s Westward Productions, translated interviews from Italian volunteer soldiers in Syria to English for The History Channel’s Hunting ISIS, as well as edited and localized English translations for five Korean webcomic series. She was also a Researcher for the 45th Annual Daytime Emmy Awards, worked as a Production Coordinator for Ignition Films, and was a winner of the 2020 HUMANITAS New Voices Fellowship with her hour-long pilot Blood Oranges.
Currently, Lena works for her alma mater as the Academic Coordinator at NYU Los Angeles, trying to impart some of the lessons she's learned the hard way to future generations of creatives.
Lena typically writes genre scripts both in the one-hour and feature film space, where she focuses on characters struggling to deal with disparate identities and twists that shake their status quo.
In the last year, because her nerd quotient was clearly not high enough, Lena has also started working on an epic fantasy book series and a romance novel.
Jessica Silvetti
Screenwriter
Jessica Silvetti is an award-winning writer and director, whose distinctive voice is a result of her unconventional upbringing. Originally from Mexico City, of Spanish descent and raised in the US, she's been shaped by different cultures and views life through a bilingual lens.
She attended NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she received a BFA in Theatre. To date she has written and directed several short films including HAPPY FOR NOTHING and POOR MAN’S MERMAID, which is an adaptation of Joe McLeod Chapman’s short story. Jessica also penned the full length play, LAURA, for which she won an Ebell of Los Angeles Playwright Prize in 2016. Her bilingual web series LOST MEMORIES, produced by ALZLA, is a narrative focusing on Alzheimer’s disease, which she wrote and directed. In November of 2017, she was recognized with a Breaking Boundaries - Visionary Women’s Award for her work on this impacting series, spotlighting Alzheimer’s disease and the Latino community.
IN ABSENTIA, an anthology series she created, wrote, and directed with her husband and partner, Ethan Kogan, is now streaming on Amazon and iNDIEFLIX. IN ABSENTIA has received numerous awards and nominations, including a Silver Remi Award from WorldFest Houston in 2017 and a Best Writing nomination at the renowned RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL in London, that same year. The series also received three nominations from the 2018 International Academy of Web Television Awards, including: Best Directing, Best Writing, and Best Drama Series. In 2019 the series was nominated for four Indie Series Awards, including Best Series and Best Directing.
Jessica is constantly developing new projects with a passion and emphasis on creating complex and diverse characters for women. Her feature screenplay, IZABELA’S VIOLIN, made it among the top 10% in the 2017 Academy Nicholls Fellowship and was a Quarterfinalist in Francis Ford Coppola’s 2018 Zoetrope Screenplay Contest, as well as a 2019 Screencraft Film Fund Semifinalist. In January of 2020, her play LAURA premiered at the Santa Monica Playhouse as part of their Benefit Series. This marked Silvetti’s directorial debut in live theatre. She currently writes on the Mexican TV series El Juego de las Llaves on Pantaya, for Amazon and Lionsgate.
Meggie Spellman
Film and TV
Writer
Meggie started her writing career at the Dramatic Writing BFA program at SUNY Purchase's Conservatory for Theater Arts and Film.
After graduating, she started taking improv and sketch classes at the Upright Citizen's Brigade Theater in NYC. Since 2013, she has written for the UCB Theater’s sketch comedy night on their house Maude teams. She has also written and produced her own comedy variety show in various NYC theaters as part of the sketch duo Black Magic Lab. Her comedy writing also includes past work as a contributor to the Funny or Die NewsFlash App, where she wrote jokes about today’s top stories. Comedy articles of hers have also been featured on the female news satire blog Reductress and Funny or Die. Her work can be found on her website meggie-spellman.com.
Megan J. Wilson
Film and TV
Writer
Megan wrote her first play (a modern and irreverent take on the Three Little Pigs) at age 10. She chooses to believe the laughter from the audience was at the jokes, not at the effort.
Megan is a Seattle native. She’s worked at a publishing house in Seattle, a law firm in North Carolina, the NFL in New York, and a cannery in Alaska – and yes, there were bears. She was a writers assistant for 3 years in NYC, and she wrote and produced a 6-episode webseries (The Sanctum, 2009). She writes action/comedy with a side of sci-fi and often features stories with families dealing with mental illness. Her scripts have been quarter finalists for the PAGE Award, Script Pipeline and Austin Film Festival, and she currently has multiple projects in development.
in 2018 she helped found the League of Women Writers, and Megan is also on the board of Chicks With Scripts. In her free time she likes snowboarding, quilting and writing graphic novels.