Creating Compelling Characters

Barbara Nance is a professional screenwriter, with over twenty-five years of experience working in the entertainment industry in Los Angeles. Among her TV series credits are Threshold (CBS), Blade (Spike), Flashforward (ABC), In Plain Sight (USA), House of Lies (Showtime), and The Lizzie Bordon Chronicles (Lifetime). In 2019, she penned the widely-acclaimed movie, I Was Lorena (Lifetime), for which she received a Canadian Screen Award award for Best Writing, TV Movie. Her second Lifetime movie, which explores sexual abuse in the Amish community, has finished production and is slated to air in October. In addition, from 2016-2021, Barbara was a Professor of Practice at the University of Southern California where she taught screenwriting, primarily in one-hour drama. She has been a frequent guest lecturer for Stephens College, and she taught a TV writing class at her alma mater in Paris, France. She has consulted for Amazon International, giving development workshops to professional writers in Brazil, Mexico, and India. As a consultant for the Grow Creative Initiative at Netflix, she has given workshops to both students and professional writers in France, Italy, Poland, and Saudi Arabia. Prior to her screenwriting career, Barbara was a software analyst. She graduated from the American University in Paris with a B.A. in Computer Science.