Los Angeles Short Film Awards June 2026 – The Reader – Best Stage Play and Three Ice Cubes – Best Psychological Screenplay
https://bestfilmawards.com/winners/los-angeles-short-film-award
Dana Wall | Stories & Scripts
"Crafting worlds where the extraordinary feels inevitable"
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Dana Wall is a fiction writer and screenwriter based in Manhattan Beach, California.
Her literary work appears in Brevity, Tupelo Quarterly, River Teeth: Beautiful Things, Hunger Mountain, Columbia Journal (contest winner), Strange Horizons, The Maine Review, Necessary Fiction, and SWWIM, among others. She has received two 2025 Pushcart Prize nominations and a Best of the Net nomination.
Her screenplay The Erasure won at the Global Film Festival Awards, and The Van Cleef Chronicles was a finalist at the Big Apple Film Festival and selected for the Alpine International Film Festival. Additional screenwriting honors include finalist recognition at Cannes World Film Festival for Three Ice Cubes and semi-finalist placements at Santa Barbara International Screenplay Awards and Flickers’ Rhode Island International Film Festival.
Dana holds an MFA from Goddard College, a Psychology degree, MBA, and CPA credentials. She spent fifteen years managing financial operations in Hollywood before transitioning to full-time creative writing in 2022. She co-authors children’s books with her daughter Amber and specializes in high-concept literary adaptations, psychological thrillers, and character-driven drama that explores memory, transformation, and the spaces between realism and the uncanny.
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My story “The Only Act She Kept” was named a finalist in Story Unlikely’s 2026 International Short Story Contest, out of more than 1,400 submissions. My story “The First Cell” placed second in the same contest.
I need to say where the finalist came from. My mother has Alzheimer’s. She has always loved Alexander Calder’s Cirque Calder, the little wire circus he built and performed by hand. I started thinking about what it would mean to lose nearly everything and keep one thing, and the story grew out of that. Celine Appel, who has early-onset Alzheimer’s, loses her memories one by one until almost nothing is left except a single tiny trapeze artist from that circus. She keeps returning to it across decades, and finds it again at the Whitney.
So this one is for my mother, who gave me the circus a long time before I knew I’d need it.
Thank you to Danny Hankner and the Story Unlikely team.
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Before Elizabeth Bennet ever sparred with Darcy, there was a teenage Jane Austen filling notebooks with stories so anarchic, so wickedly funny, so shockingly modern that scholars would later compare them to Beckett and Pinter. Between the ages of eleven and seventeen she wrote twenty-nine works of savage wit and absurdist comedy — and they have never been captured on screen.
Until now.
My original pilot, Jane Austen’s Juvenilia, has been named a Finalist at both the Atlanta Screenwriting Competition and the prestigious Cinequest Film & Screenplay Festival. This is the Jane before the restraint. The comedian before the drawing room. The girl who has been waiting two hundred years for her close-up.
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The Red Migration (Story Unlikely), Tangent Online Reading list logo compliments of Story Unlikely Editor, Danny Hanker
Three Ice Cubes – Semifinalist Short Screenplay – BlueCat Screenplay Competition – 40 of 1091 shorts
The Six Loops of Scott & Capital Crimes – Semifinalist Screenplay – Pitch Now Screenplay Competition
The Six Loops of Scott & Juvenilia – Selected Screenplay and Teleplay – Los Angeles Int’l Screenplay Competition
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My short screenplays CUT FLOWERS and THREE ICE CUBES both made it to the Quarterfinals of the BlueCat Screenplay Competition—105 selected from 1,097 submissions. Honored to have both stories recognized.
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Named to Tangent Online’s 2025 Recommended Reading List
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“Milk Teeth” forthcoming in the 10th Anniversary Issue of Ink in Thirds, Spring 2026.
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A podcast for short but powerful writing.
Dana Wall | Stories & Scripts 