Leanne Mangan is a screenwriter based in Sydney, Australia.
She graduated from UNSW with a Bachelor of Arts in English and Drama. Initially a performer (training at The Actor’s Centre amongst others), she went on to act in many plays and musicals, as well as doing short films and extra work in film and TV.
Seeing a lack of roles for women over 40, Leanne began to write for performance. For the Sydney Fringe Festival she wrote, performed in and produced the alt/goth musical In Between Days (at the King St Theatre in 2013). She wrote another musical in 2015, Sci-fi Love Story, as yet unproduced.
In 2016 she studied the Advanced Diploma in Screenwriting for Series TV. She developed one script exercise from the course into a short film script – The Morning After – which was later nominated for the 2018 AWG Monte Miller Awards, and saw her inducted into the AWG Pathways Program.
Leanne assembled a crew through Filmmaker Abroad and shot the short film on location in Siem Reap, Cambodia in September 2016 (self-funded). She was script edited and mentored in directing by Sean Cousins (lecturer in film at Melbourne SAE and Filmmaker Abroad director).
In 2017 she completed Semester 1 of the Advanced Diploma in Script Editing for Production, gaining greater insight into script structure, and gaining experience in script editing, script coverage, and writing script notes.
In 2018 she travelled to Cambodia where The Morning After was an official selection in the Cambodia International Film Festival. The film has been an official selection in many festivals here and abroad, including the 2018 AACTA Awards, and it got to Top 4 this year in the audience award section of the AFI/AACTA Social Shorts Awards.
She has also co-written and co-produced a second short film – Remote Access – with Michela Carattini. Filmed over Easter 2018, it began its festival run in 2019 – starting with a World Premiere in New York City on March 23! It won best short at that festival, the Girl Power Film + Media Summit, and is now showing at the streaming service Herflix. For more about the film, check out the Remote Access website.
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