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."
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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 examines the human condition. Dana's first foray, a comic book mini-series, landed her on the Diamond indie bestsellers list twice.
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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.
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!
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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.
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.
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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.
Kei Haynes
Film and TV
Writer
Kei can point to several moments in her childhood that were formative but at age 12, two major life events informed each other. She attended a program that prepared her for boarding school which would take her away from her sister and three cousins. Shortly after reading a book in that program about a child with a brain tumor, everyone’s favorite person and Kei’s cousin, Jason, fell sick with childhood cancer. She decided from then on that she should be a healer and her Caribbean and Asian parents latched onto that doctoral dream. But in her senior year of college, she took a screenwriting class and a new dream was born.
Because of those indelible childhood marks, Kei writes about family relations, societal issues particularly health, and often with an ensemble cast. Pathos is usually a highlight of her one-hour dramas. One of her scripts was a semi-finalist this year at the Austin Film Festival and is currently in the top 2% on Coverfly. It was story that changed Kei - the story of that book and the story of her cousin’s life - and that’s why she’s a writer.