Each year Nostos Screenwriting Retreat offers 1 full scholarship for each of the three week intensive screenwriting workshops taking place in the gorgeous Tuscan Countryside.
The next workshop will happen in Tuscany in April 2020.
The screenwriting workshop will take the participants through the process of creating the script for a feature film, from putting together an outline and beat sheet and, finally, turning the structural outline into scenes.
It is designed for beginners as well as seasoned screenwriters, who need a place to focus and get feedback on their ideas.
The Screenwriting Lab is based on a combination of individual writing phases, personal talks and coachings. The unique surroundings and the landscape of Tuscany provide an ideal setting to encourage the creative writing process.
Here are the Biographies of the team of instructors and facilitators running the retreat:
Bryan Delaney is a playwright, screenwriter and dramaturg. From 2010 - 2014 he ran the New Playwrights Programm at The Abbey Theatre, Ireland’s national theatre. His TV pilot Jordan (co-written with Daniel Dowling) was one of the winning scripts in the 2015 BAFTA Rocliffe TV Drama Competition and was selected for the BAFTA Forum List. He was a winner of the 2013 BBC Writers-room open submissions competition to develop new TV drama/comedy for the BBC in London. He is the recipient of the 2014 Theater Masters Visionary Playwright Award in conjunction with the Aspen Institute. Plays include The Seedbed (nominated for L. Arnold Weissberger Award; finalist Verity Bargate Award; public reading Manhattan Theatre Club, 2014, scheduled for production at New Jersey Repertory Theatre, 2015); The Onion Game (selected from 2,800 scripts as a BBC Writers-room winner (above); public readings at New York Stage and Film and the Vineyard Theatre off-Broadway); The Cobbler (Irish Classical Theatre: Katherine Cornell Award; joint winner 16th International Playwriting Competition); Solemn Mass for a Full Moon in Summer (translation of Michel Tremblay’s play, Rough Magic, Dublin), The Bohemians (Carnegie Hall, New York), Stretching Larry (Theatre Upstairs, Dublin). He is co-writer (with Catherine Eaton) of the feature film, LIV, (shortlisted for Sundance Screenwriters Lab) currently touring festivals all over the world. He was a script consultant and a member of the creative team behind We Need to Talk About Ireland – a contemporary reflection on Ireland that was broadcast around the world on St. Patrick’s Day, 2014. He was invited to give a master class on storytelling at the Future of Storytelling Summit in New York in 2014 and was an Aspen Scholar at the 2014 Aspen Ideas Festival. Other awards include two playwright’s bursaries from The Peggy Ramsay Foundation and two travel awards and an artist’s bursary from The Arts Council of Ireland. In 2006 he was awarded the Samuel Beckett Centenary International Writer’s Residency at the Irish Cultural Centre in Paris. He also teaches advanced playwriting and screenwriting at University of Pennsylvania and playwriting at Harvard Summer School and is an invited guest of the 2015 New Play Festival at the University of Iowa. He is represented by Gersh.
Rudy Thauberger wrote the screenplays for the feature films The Rhino Brothers and Chicago Heights (with Daniel Nearing), as well as the short film Goalie (based on his short story). He has also written teleplays for the SyFy network movies-of-the week Snowmaggedon and The 12 Disasters of Christmas.
He is a past winner of the BC Literary Rites short story competition, a finalist in the Canadian National Playwriting Contest, a two-time winner of the Monday Magazine short story contest and has been shortlisted four times in the annual 3-Day Novel Contest. He is the co-creater and writer of the web series Coma State (currently in development) and has worked as a story editor on several films and comic books, most recently the feature film Hogtown. His short story Goalie has been anthologized over twenty times.
Currently, he's working on several film, television and comic book projects, including the upcoming webs series 60 Second Screams.
He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and works as an instructor at the Vancouver Film School.
Nora Jaenicke is an award-winning filmmaker currently residing between Cambridge and New York City. She grew up in Italy with German parents and studied Film at the European Institute of Design in Rome and Screenwriting at Vancouver Film School. Later on she was able to deepen her studies in Psychology and Creative Writing at Harvard University through their Extension Studies program, while on a full scholarship. She has worked in Cologne, Germany, for a Documentary Film Production Company and as a Set Designer in Los Angeles, before starting to write and direct her own films. Her feature length screenplay Whales was selected to be a part of the Kitzbuehl Writing Residency in August 2017 and was a semi-finalist at Oscar qualifying Nashville Film Festival. Her first feature film is slated for production in May 2020. She has made several short films that won multiple awards at prestigious festivals all over the world. When she is not busy exploring the world, writing or making films, she runs Nostos Screenwriting Retreats in the heart of Tuscany and a Film Festival on the Italian island of Elba.
We are awarding a full scholarship every year for each one of our retreats.
