ABOUT SHAWNA
ABOUT SHAWNA
Following a childhood dream to move to Los Angeles and become a storyteller, Shawna left home in Lodi, California to attend USC in Los Angeles. She graduated with a BA in Entertainment, Media, and Society, and minored in film. Every elective course was devoted to theatrical studies. With a deep love of the arts, her focus was to create a powerful foundation that would bridge culture through various mediums, including books, cinematic arts, and live stage storytelling.
What followed has been a life lived across forms, collaborating with incredible humans to bring meaningful stories to the world.
Everything Shawna puts her hands to is rooted in a core belief: we’re all on a journey searching for the way home. She believes there is more beneath the surface of what is seen, and hidden within the depths of our stories are breadcrumbs guiding us home. Home to ourselves. To our families. To our connection with one another and all of creation. To our Creator.
Digging into those depths and searching for those breadcrumbs has become the practice of her life. She follows the questions underneath the questions, with a unique discernment and gift of finding language for what she discovers there.
That instinct shaped her first book, Mountains Into Roads, a memoir born from journals dated back to childhood, and a cross-country road trip taken in the years between losing a mother and becoming a mother. Moving between past and present, grief and hope, the journey carries her across the American landscape and back through the defining places, relationships, losses, and longings that shaped her, becoming an adventure not only across the country, but across the heart.
Shawna pursues projects that exist outside comfort zones, meant to provoke meaningful reflection and connection. That pursuit has taken her to the stage as both a performer and director, in front of and behind the camera, and into the heart of international campaigns. It also inspired the launch of The Storytelling House to help others discover and tell their own stories.
Whether directing a short run of a play, helping shape the story of a global movement, or producing long-haul projects like the Danny Clinch documentary All I Can Say on Blind Melon frontman Shannon Hoon, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, the form has changed, but the why has always remained. Shawna loved calling both LA and NYC home during different seasons of life, and now lives with her family somewhere in between. She and her husband went to high school together, and their own love story has now stretched across more than two decades. They are raising their three children in Tennessee, where life is full and loud: homeschooling, gardening, baking, jiu-jitsu practice and baseball games, musical theatre, books, music, and a house where creativity is always being cultivated.
She believes in the power of strong friendships, gathering around the table with good people, and pouring into the community you’re a part of. So alongside working, momming, and wifeing, friending is one of the great priorities of her life.
She also likes to make up words like friending.
Spontaneous dance-partying.
Questionable spontaneous pet-purchasing.
And slowing down for walks, homemade ice-cream, and anything else that feels a little like childhood (nostalgiaing).
She is currently finishing her second book, a work of historical fiction inspired by her own rich family history that holds threads of what she most enjoys pursuing in her work: life-altering adventure, grief, generational inheritance, and the legacies we knowingly and unknowingly, leave behind.
For Shawna, storytelling has never been simply about entertainment. It’s about finding the threads that connect us across people, places, and generations, and following them home.
Letters from farther down the road…
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