Writing for Drama Archives - Disability Belongs

David Dineen-Porter

RespectAbility Entertainment Professionals Lab 2024

David Dineen-Porter

David Dineen-Porter (he/him) is a multiply neuro-diverse writer, musician, and comedian from the maple drenched shores of Toronto. Unlike most screenwriters, he studied Assyriology at the University of Toronto, where he translated five-thousand-year-old Babylonian tablets for four years. His darkly comedic writing focuses on misfits struggling to conform to systems which have rejected them, a thread drawn from his own life dealing with disability. [continue reading…]

Jeremy Hsing

RespectAbility Entertainment Professionals Lab 2024

Jeremy Hsing

Jeremy Hsing is a humanistic sci-fi writer, mental health advocate, and second-gen Taiwanese immigrant based in Los Angeles. He specializes in using his psychology background (BA in Psychology and double minor in art history and film from UCLA) to construct elaborate worlds in which his characters are forced to experience an internal reckoning in the pursuit of an emotional catharsis. [continue reading…]

Monica Cecilia Lucas

RespectAbility Entertainment Professionals Lab 2024

Monica Cecilia Lucas

Monica Cecilia Lucas is a neurodivergent, Puerto Rican screenwriter who hails from suburban California. Raised by a career-military father and a New Yorican mother, Lucas lived a sheltered childhood of strictly enforced rules. As a teenager, she rebelled the best way she knew how: by moving to rural Ohio, where she sank deep into the world of politics. After receiving her BA in Political Science, she relocated to Washington, D.C., where she spent four years as a political activist working in the U.S. Department of State and for various nonprofits and think tanks. Disillusioned by the 2016 election, she abandoned her political ambitions and moved to Los Angeles, where she received her MFA in Writing for Screen and Television from USC. She has since worked as a Production Assistant, a Showrunner’s Assistant, and has participated in a number of writing programs including the Inevitable Foundation’s Accelerate Screenwriting Fellowship. [continue reading…]

Sandrene Mathews

RespectAbility Entertainment Professionals Lab 2024

Sandrene Mathews

A former child actor, Sandrene Mathews has spent most of her life in the creative world. Often told she was too shy to be in the entertainment industry, she repeatedly silenced and astonished naysayers with lead roles on stage and on screen in her hometown of Pittsburgh, PA. She also competed in and won a variety of vocalist, instrumentalist, and dance competitions. By the time she graduated high school, she was a multiple-published author of short stories and poetry. [continue reading…]

Teresa Jusino

RespectAbility Entertainment Professionals Lab 2024

Teresa Jusino

Teresa Jusino is a native New Yorker and a proud Puerto Rican, Jewish, bisexual woman with ADHD. For more than a decade, Jusino has been a pop culture journalist, her work appearing in outlets like Tor.com, Jezebel, Latina Magazine, Teen Vogue, and The Mary Sue, where she was an editor from 2015-18 and is currently a contributing writer. [continue reading…]