Bio

Dan Plagens is an allegedly funny writer originally from Metro Detroit. He has quirky personal stories about the unorthodox way he learned to read and how his first word was fuck.

He currently writes The Book of Jobbed, a weekly Substack newsletter about sports and the existential angst they cause. It covers questionable officiating, inexplicable bounces, and the teams, coaches, and players God has clearly forsaken but people root for anyway. Check out the about page and subscribe here.

His screenwriting has won the the Leonard and Eileen Newman Prize in Dramatic Writing and placed in the PAGE International Screenwriting Awards, the Austin Film Festival, Script Summit, the Emerging Writers Genre Screenplay Competition, the Filmmatic Comedy Screenplay Awards, and for the Filmmatic Fellowship. His essay on screenwriting software, “Reinventing the Typewriter,” can be found on the Humanitas blog and his short fiction has appeared on Freedom Fiction dot com.

After freelance stints as a Production Assistant on the YouTube Red (remember YouTube Red?) series Paranormal Action Squad, an Associate Producer on unscripted series Date My Grandma and Ghost Loop, a researcher for Film45, and as a video editor for a handful of documentarians, he joined Humanitas in 2019. As Humanitas’s Program Manager, he oversees the Humanitas Prizes, New Voices Fellowship, and College Screenwriting Awards programs while also handling day-to-day administrative matters.

Dan graduated from the University of Michigan’s Film, Television, and Media program, where he was admitted to its selective screenwriting sub-concentration. In 2020, he was named to the University of Michigan Entertainment Coalition’s Blue List, a compilation of the university’s up-and-coming screenwriting alumni. As a Michigan sports fan, he can be reliably found in front of his television any time the Wolverines are playing football or basketball.

He lives in Los Angeles. You can hit him up on Twitter at @dan_plagens, and learn more about his scripts on his Coverfly profile here. He’s also on Instagram for some reason as @danplagens; he understands Instagram as a concept but just can’t bring himself to use it consistently.

Photo by Shannon Cottrell