WENDY
DANN
[ SCREENWRITER, STAGE DIRECTOR & PLAYWRIGHT ]
As a stage director and playwright, Wendy Dann has led creative teams of over thirty productions at Tony-Award winning regional theatres like the Dallas Theater Center, the Alliance Theatre and the Rep at St Louis.
Wendy studied acting and writing at Ithaca College, then worked professionally as an actor as well as a freelance feature news writer. She began directing plays soon after, which led her toward an MFA in directing from Syracuse University and a career as a freelance stage director. In staging play after play, she discovered that well-crafted stories can change the way people live their lives.
Soon after Wendy began screenwriting, Wendy was invited to The Writer’s Lab 2021, sponsored by Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman and Oprah Winfrey. In the same year, she was a second-rounder at the Austin Film Festival and a finalist with contests like the Page Awards and Screencraft. Her live-action short film was invited to two festivals.
Wendy is a stepmother and a stepchild. She’s interested in the forces that break families apart and the forces that might bring them back together. She also writes intellectual drama that confronts larger questions about justice and who we are as a nation. Interviews with court justices and criminal defense lawyers led to the development of her one-hour drama pilot, THE JURY.
Wendy grew up in Upstate New York farm country and that’s probably why a cow shows up in nearly all her scripts.