Debbie Danielpour (AKA Debbie Danielpour Chapel) writes fiction, screenplays, libretti and essays.  She has been a professor of screenwriting and fiction at San Francisco State University, Emerson College, Harvard University and now at Boston University where she was awarded Teacher of the Year in 2011 and 2017 and is co-chair of the department of film and television.  

 

Her fiction and essays have been published in a number of literary and academic journals, among them: “Land Where My Fathers Died,” Agni; “A Wedding,” Salamander; “Woodchuck,” Natural Bridge; “What If Eveline Reads This?,” Another Chicago Magazine; “Imitation and Adaptation: A Screenwriting Pedagogy," Journal of Screenwriting; and “Women Screenwriters of Iran,” in International Women Screenwriters; “The Short-Form Scripted Serial Drama,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Screenwriting Studies.

  

Her seventh motion picture screenplay, We’re All Here, is currently in development with Rimer Blue Films. Make It Stop, a limited series about the troubled American family court system, is also in development. Her most recent films, Halfway Somewhere Else (2013) and His Last Game (2015), were screened at Cannes among many other festivals.    

 

Danielpour collaborated with Toni Morrison on the libretto for Margaret Garner (Philadelphia Opera, NY City Opera 2005) for composer Richard Danielpour.  She wrote the libretto, The Great Good Thing, for composer Bruce Wolosoff and the  musical, The King’s Ear, with composer Matti Kovler.

    

Professor Danielpour has an AB from Harvard College, an MA in film production and screenwriting from San Francisco State University, and an MFA in fiction and literature from the Bennington Writing Seminars.