Ms. Hansen is a Writers Guild Award winner and an EMMY-nominated screenwriter and consultant who has had a varied writing, directing, and acting career, that has taken her from the bright lights of Broadway working with the likes of Tommy Tune and Harold Prince, to the newsrooms of the Los Angeles Times where she had her own “Byline,” to the classrooms of Brigham Young University where she taught screenwriting and playwriting from 1994-2000 as well as helped focus their Screenwriting Program.
After graduating with honors from the University of Utah, Ms. Hansen journeyed to Los Angeles to study musical theatre performance at the highly regarded Los Angeles Civic Light Opera Musical Theatre Workshop as well as acting technique with Charles Nelson-Reilly. From Los Angeles she moved to New York where she studied with the famed acting teacher Uta Hagen. Over the next few years she was seen on Broadway in A Day In Hollywood/A Night In The Ukraine and Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up. In her acting career she has starred opposite Milton Berle in Guys and Dolls, James Mason in A Partridge in a Pear Tree, Carol Channing in Hello, Dolly!, and Rudolf Nureyev in The King and I, as well as numerous musicals Off-Broadway and in regional theatre.
In the late 80s, Ms. Hansen decided to focus on her writing and was accepted into the prestigious American Film Institute Center for Advanced Film and Television studies, one of the top five film programs in the U.S., where she received an MFA in screenwriting. Since then, she has written for nearly every film and video venue in the business: feature film, short film, television (long and short form), corporate video, documentary, as well a s musicals and straight plays for the legitimate theatre.
She has spent numerous years as a script consultant, first with the Pasadena Playhouse, where she reviewed new and established scripts which were under consideration, as well as with Entertainment Business Group, an entertainment consulting company where she worked on “Campaign Breakdowns” and “Comparative Picture Analyses”
Also a film and stage director, she has directed a handful of short films and just completed directing Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for Sundance Summer Theatre.
In addition to her Writer’s Guild Award and her Emmy nomination, Ms. Hansen was a finalist for the esteemed Humanitas Prize for excellence in children’s television programing, a Telly Award for her work with the Foundation for a Better Life and has been awarded two Crystal Awards for excellence in corporate video writing as well as numerous screenwriting competitions.
MUSICALS AUTHORED
- An Enchanted April — A Musical
- How The West Was Done
- They Called Him Brother Joseph
- An Enchanted April VOCAL SELECTIONS
- How The West Was Done VOCAL SELECTIONS
- They Called Him Brother Joseph VOCAL SELECTIONS
PLAYS AUTHORED
- A High and Glorious Place — a one-woman play about Eliza R. Snow
- A String of Pearls
- Tangents
- A Pearl of Great Price
- TWO PLAYS FOR WOMEN (PRINT BOOK containing “A String of Pearls” and “Tangents”)
SCREENPLAYS AUTHORED
- Windriver
- Eliza and I (Based on A High and Glorious Place)
- A Light In The Forest
- American Eyes (A Schoolbreak Special)
- The Sisters of Bethany
- The Christmas Stranger (TV)
- Classroom
- Benefits: Possible
- What’s Wrong With Bob?
- Fang, Fang, You’re Dead!
- The Last Kill
- The High Road
- Coming Home
- Thirst
- Point Neuf
- One Wagon West
- Hank & George
- Blousons Noir
- Hank & George
- The Only Alien On The Planet