The Executive Council meets on-line monthly. We regularly take a screenshot of our meetings. Here is the image from our meeting held in June 2024, where we welcomed our new Early Career Researcher (ECR) Representative, Hugo Armando Arciniegas. Hugo will be working with Clarissa Miranda, our previous ECR Representative, to keep our social media platforms buzzing. Clarissa has also taken on the role of website coordinator, and is also preparing to host our second regional conference in Florianopolis, Brazil, in 2026. Stay tuned for more information about that!
Here you can find information about the Executive Council and its activities (below). The current members of the Executive Council are:
Rosanne Welch, PhD, (Vice-Chair) serves as Executive Director of Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting where she created a set of History of Screenwriting courses (because ‘History of Film’ courses become History of Directors’ courses and thereby ‘History of Great Men’) and teaches courses in One-Hour Drama. Her television writing credits include Beverly Hills 90210, Picket Fences, ABCNEWS: Nightline and Touched by an Angel. Welch edited When Women Wrote Hollywood (2018), named runner-up for the Susan Koppelman Award honoring the best anthology, multi-authored, or edited book in feminist studies by the Popular Culture Association. She co-edited Women in American History: A Social, Political, and Cultural Encyclopedia (named to both the 2018 Outstanding References Sources List and to the list of Best Historical Materials, by the American Library Association) and wrote Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Popular Culture. In 2016 Welch gave the talk “The Importance of Having a Female Voice in the Room” at the TEDxCPP (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JFNsqKBRnA). She also serves as Book Reviews Editor of the Journal of Screenwriting.
Isadora García Avis, PhD, (Secretary) is Lecturer in Audiovisual Narrative at the School of Communication Sciences, Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (Spain), where she teaches modules on film and television narrative, screenwriting for television formats and transmedia storytelling. She obtained her PhD at the University of Navarra (Spain), with a doctoral dissertation on transcultural remakes in television. Her thesis was awarded the First Prize of Research in Audiovisual Communication, issued by the Audiovisual Council of Catalunya (CAC). Her main academic interests focus on adaptation studies, screenwriting, and television formats (more specifically, scripted series). Her research tends to have a transcultural scope, and it usually combines textual and hermeneutical analysis of audiovisual narratives with other qualitative methods, like in-depth interviews with screenwriters and producers. You can find her publications at Google Scholar, ORCID and Academia.edu.
Jan Černík, PhD, (Newsletter Editor) is Assistant Professor in Film Studies at Palacký University (Czech Republic). In research he combines an interest in the topics of Czech and Czechoslovak cinema, audiovisual industries, and screenwriting. He believes that in an exploration of audiovisual culture, we have to consider the applicability of our findings, which is an idea highly compatibile with the efforts of Screenwriting Research Network. Jan graduated in film studies and philosophy and received his Ph.D. degree in film history in 2018. You can find his publications at ORCID, Academia.edu and Research Gate.
Clarissa Miranda, PhD, (Website Coordinator, ECR Mentor) is a Lecturer of Antonio Meneghetti College (Brazil). She achieved a Ph.D. in Letters at Universidade Federal de Santa Maria (Brazil) in 2018. Her PhD thesis explores the intersemiotic translation of novels into movie scripts. She holds a Masters in Midiatic Communication at the same institution (2012) and a Bachelors in Journalism from Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (2005). Clarissa has completed several short courses in screenwriting. As a screenwriter and producer, she developed documentaries in the fields of Arts, Music, and Architecture and has also worked on biopics. Nowadays, Clarissa is working on the adaptation of a Brazilian novel to a series, a project that has been selected for the laboratory of TFL TV Next. As an academic, Clarissa has published on Latin American screenwriters, with special interest in women in the field; biopics; and adaptation studies. She works as a lecturer for Antonio Meneghetti College in the field of Entrepreneurship; as international affairs assistant for Fundação Antonio Meneghetti; as a journalist for the magazine Performance Líder; as cultural manager for the Recanto Maestro Youth Orchestra; and as a freelance screenwriter. You can find her at Academia.edu
Dr. Lucian Georgescu (Coordinator, SRN ‘Conversations’) is a professor of screenwriting at UNATC, the Romanian National University of Theatre and Film, where he has fundamentally reshaped the writing curricula in the last decade. His research focuses on the narrative paradigms of the road movie genre. He has published works in Romanian such as “Pe drum cu Jim” (On the Road with Jim/Jarmusch) and “Dialoguri despre scenariu” (Dialogues on Screenwriting), which is a compilation of his conversations with his mentor, Dumitru Carabat, the founder of the National Screenwriting school. Some of his essays are available in English, including “The New Romanian Cinema at the Point of No Return” in “East, West, and Centre: Reframing post-1989 European Cinema” (Edinburgh University Press) and “The Road Movies of the New Romanian Cinema” in “Studies in Eastern European Cinema” (Intellect). His other research interests include the application of the open-source concept to cinema distribution and the impact of the streaming industry on contemporary film language. A pioneer in the Romanian audiovisual commercial industry and the national cultural marketing movement, he is the founder and acting president of cinepub.ro, a curated AVOD platform for independent cinema, and serves as a Guest Editor of Intellect – Journal of Digital Media and Policy.
Hugo Armando Arciniegas (Social Media Coordinator / Early Career Researcher) is a Colombian writer and scholar. He’s currently pursuing his Ph.D. in Latin American Literature at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), where he explores how the image of the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas changes between his autobiography Antes que anochezca and its rewritings in screenplay and film. He is a Junior Researcher according to the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation of Colombia. He’s also working on a project called “Pioneer Women Writers in Mexican Cinema” at UNAM. This project intends to recover the screenplays written by female writers during the so-called Golden Age of Mexican cinema. He’s studying for a diploma in Screenwriting Studies at UNAM. He has a strong interest in screenwriting studies, intermedial studies and Latin American literature. He has written for publications such as Acta Poética, Lingüística y Literatura and Literatura: teoría, historia, crítica. You can find all his publications at ORCID, Academia.edu, Research Gate and Google Scholar
Juan Carlos Carrillo, PhD, (Membership Coordinator) is a full-time lecturer at Universidad Panamericana in Mexico, where he served as the Director of the Undergraduate Degree in Communication for seven years. He teaches courses in Audiovisual Narratives, Film History, and Screenwriting.
Dr. Carrillo earned his PhD from Universidad de los Andes in Chile, with a dissertation focused on violence in Mexican cinema, exploring the cathartic nature of violence through Aristotle’s Poetics and its contemporary interpretations. He holds a Master’s Degree in Narrative and Digital Production from Universidad Panamericana, Mexico, and a Bachelor’s Degree in Hispanic Philology and Audiovisual Communication from the University of Navarra, Spain.
His academic interests include screenwriting and research on narrative and poetics in audiovisual fiction, with a particular focus on contemporary Mexican cinema and transnational cinema. He is an active member of the Screenwriting Research Network and the Ibero-American Research Network in Audiovisual Narratives (Red INAV). Additionally, he chairs the Film Committee of SIGNIS Mexico, an International Association of Catholic Communicators, and has served as a jury member at several international film festivals, including those in Guanajuato, Washington, Toulouse, and Warsaw.