About Linda Cowgill

Linda Cowgill recently wrote and directed her first short film since winning the Jim Morrison Award at UCLA when she was a student there. Her film, The Last Will & Testament of Candace Martin, premieres at The Culver City Film Festival in December. The short is a proof of concept for a feature script with the same characters.

Linda has written television and films for Paramount, Universal, MGM, Warner Bros., Orion, and several small independents. She wrote for the acclaimed series LIFE GOES ON, and her episode won the Genesis Award, and was nominated for a Scott New man Award for her episode of THE YOUNG RIDERS.

She has taught seminars and workshops at the American Film Institute, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., the Boston Film Institute, Loyola Marymount University, IFP Miami and NALIP. She currently heads the Screenwriting Department at the Los Angeles Film School. Her books, Secrets of Screenplay Structure and Writing Short Films, are used at colleges and universities across the US, Canada and the UK. Recently, Writing Short Films has been translated into German, and Secrets of Screenplay Structure into Korean.

Her experience mentoring screenwriters in the LA Film School's Feature Film Development Program led her to create The Art of Plotting seminar. Linda saw that while her writers were using structural concepts, they were still not maximizing the emotional, creative and technical potential of their stories. Building on the lessons she gave to those writers, The Art of Plotting hopes to provide other writers with the effective tools to weave the threads of their stories into emotional, compelling and unified wholes. 

She received her MFA from UCLA's School of Film and Television.