College Notes: Rockville Student Dreams Of Writing For Pixar Studios

ROCKVILLE, MD — Dan Cummins, a double major in screenwriting arts and English and creative writing from Rockville, is currently a student in the Department of Cinematic Arts in the University of Iowa's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, according to a release from Merit News.

Dreaming of one day writing a film for animation studio Pixar, Cummins first came to the Iowa City campus for a two-week summer residential program in creative writing.

Among Cummins' instructors were UI faculty and alumni of the Iowa Writers Workshop.

"Literature is baked into almost every aspect of the city," Cummins said, in a release. "There's so much literary history here. At the library, you can go to a machine and print out a short story written by a student. We have so many lit magazines and incredible bookstores. For a writer, it's like a haven."

That exposure to what UI had to offer students interested in becoming writers influenced his decision to apply there after Cummins graduated high school.

UI first began offering a major in screenwriting arts in 2020. Even though the program wasn't offered when Cummins was a freshman, he switched is major over to cinema once it became available.

"Writing, for me, used to be sitting at a computer, often late into the night, banging my head on a keyboard, trying to get words out, and struggling," he said. "But screenwriting and filmmaking demand a lot of collaboration; otherwise, a movie doesn't get made. When you see your classmates two times a week for a couple of hours and read each other's work and share feedback, you become friends. I think that has made our writing better. The feedback is much more personal-and it's a community we're interested in keeping after graduation, hopefully for the rest of our careers."

With the help of program director Anahita Ghazvinizadeh, Cummins secured a three-month internship with Andrew Sugarman, a film producer at Pantheon Entertainment.

"Screenwriting can be a difficult field to be prominent in, but I'm very confident that there will be students out of Iowa who become very well-known and important screenwriters over the next few years," said Ghazvinizadeh, whose debut feature, "They," received a special screening at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. "The quality of their work is undeniable. We're not New York. We're not L.A. We are not a city with a lot of film productions. But we are a writing town, and my goal is to make this program not only a four-year BA program but a residency for writers to produce a lot of quality work."

To shine a light on the accomplished of college students from Rockville, Patch shares information provided by the students' families and Merit News. Don't see your award-winning scholar among those appearing in this academic honors list? Send the details to Patch editor Michael O'Connell at [email protected] and Patch will include them in a future post.