Srinivasan emigrated from Chennai to the US.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: An Indian American was among the nine writers chosen to be a part of the HBOAccess Writers Fellowship, which will be held at the HBO campus in Santa Monica, Calif.
According to Deadline Hollywood, Chennai-born Prathiksha Srinivasan was chosen out of a pool of 2,000 submissions as part of a writing team consisting of herself and Joshua Levy, a “twenty-something” who credits his Chinese grandmother, a survivor of WWII, and his father, a street-kid from the projects in Brooklyn, for giving him his obsession with storytelling.
Prathiksha is an immigrant whose love of writing stems from the Hindu myths her grandmother told her throughout her childhood. Moving to the United States resulted in a certain degree of culture shock that consequently influenced “her passion for characters who are stuck between where they come from and where they are going.” Prathiksha has a bachelor’s degree in Literature from the University of Texas at Dallas.
Per the HBOAccess Writing Fellowship’s official mission statement, the program is designed to give emerging, diverse writers the opportunity to develop a half-hour script suitable for HBO or Cinemax.
The fellowship will consist of a series of master classes held over one week in mid-August. Classes will consist of discussions with HBO executives and showrunners and will focus on character, story, pitching, securing an agent, and networking. Each participant will then be paired with an HBO or Cinemax development executive who will serve as his/her mentor throughout next 8 months.
Finally, at the end of the 8 months, HBO will hold a reception for industry professionals where the writers will be introduced to the entertainment community.
The inaugural Writers Fellowship was launched following the success of the HBOAccess Directing Program, which began in 2014 and allowed four emerging directors to attend a series of lectures and classes with HBO executives, mentors, and industry professionals before shooting short films that can currently be seen via HBO GO and On Demand.