AAPD is proud to announce the recipients of the 2018 NBCUniversal Tony Coelho Media Scholarship! In 2018, AAPD was able to offer eight (8) NBCUniversal Tony Coelho Media Scholarships to second year associate students; undergraduate sophomores, juniors, and seniors; and graduate students with disabilities pursuing communications or media-related degrees thanks to the generous support of NBCUniversal.
MFA in Screenwriting alumna Lara Ameen is a screenwriter, genre fiction writer, disability activist, and PhD student in Education with an emphasis in Disability Studies at Chapman University. She received a Master of Fine Arts in Screenwriting from California State University, Northridge (CSUN) and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of California at Berkeley in Film Studies with a minor in Disability Studies. She has given lectures and presented on panels with prominent actors, writers, and showrunners about disability representation in the media at American University, Chapman University, CalArts, CSUN, and UCLA. Her scripts have placed in Screencraft’s Bahamas Screenwriters Residency Program, the Austin Film Festival Screenplay Competition, and the Fresh Voices Screenplay Competition. Passionate about intersectional disability representation, she writes TV drama pilots, short film scripts, and paranormal fantasy novellas about queer disabled characters who save the world. In the future, she hopes to publish a series of fantasy novels and become a showrunner for a successful supernatural/sci-fi/fantasy TV drama series that features a diverse cast of disabled characters portrayed by disabled actors.