Nina Costanza

When Nina Costanza was a Penn undergraduate, the creative writing department was just getting off the ground; there was no creative writing major, so Nina created an individualized major combining English courses with small writing workshops led by writers such as Philip Roth and Jerry Mangione. “It worked in my favor that it was an unknown, undeveloped program because it was so small, and we had fantastic teachers,” she recalls. Nina’s career path after college shows the wide range of professional outcomes open to students of the creative arts: she studied music composition in New York City, was editor-in-chief of Arabesque Magazine, an international journal of Middle East culture, and freelanced as an editor and writer before returning to Philadelphia to teach English. But, she says, “my intention was always to go back to writing.” Returning to Penn for creative writing courses through the Penn Alumni Program brings her path full circle. 

Nina had explored playwriting for the stage during her time in New York, but had always been interested in writing for the screen as well. “I love Italian neorealist filmmakers. It was a 1974 movie by Luchino Visconti, Death in Venice, that inspired me,” she recalls. “That’s what I want to do. And I knew I didn’t want to go into the production end, or take the camera and figure out angles. I want to write.” While she pursued her various creative and professional projects, she kept up with emerging directors in art film and independent film; she likes some of the work by Noah Baumbach, Luca Guadagnino, and Pedro Almodóvar. She began taking film studies classes at Bryn Mawr Film Institute, which helped her realize “I really needed the inspiration of taking a class. I needed that motivation,” she says. “And I’ve got to do it now, or I’m never going to do it.”

Once enrolled in the Penn Alumni Program, Nina worked with her advisor Jaime Kelly, director of the Penn Alumni Program. Jaime was instrumental in coordinating Nina’s studies, and helped her to get registered for a screenwriting course. “It was just like my writing workshops when I was originally studying at Penn,” she says. “We were writing our own scripts. The objective was to finish an entire film script. So we were constantly writing, and every week two or three students would present their work, and we would act them out in class.” Nina notes that although her classmates were interested in different genres than her script, they were all engaged in a similar enough process that their feedback was constructive and helpful. “I could see how other people were working through the conflicts they were trying to resolve in their film. Genre didn’t matter in that case. The feedback would be both from students and the teacher, and the professor was extremely knowledgeable, personal, encouraging, and incredibly detailed in her commentary. The film department, directed by Nicola Gentili, and my professor, Kathy DeMarco Van Cleve, were both extremely supportive in assisting me in my objectives. Kathy is superb in her direction, knowledge, motivation, and personal attention to her students’ works. I credit the two of them for providing an excellent course in film writing which has encouraged me to continue.”

With the structure and support of her workshop, Nina turned her lifelong passion and curiosity for art cinema into a full-length film script. “Everything I'm doing in this script connects to ideas that have been running around in my brain for all this time. It's pulling together a lot of my thinking,” she says. “I think of writing as literary and narrative, and music as movement and emotion. Film is a combination of both.” The next steps are to edit the draft of her script—and eventually to register for another writing course with her screenwriting professor. “Don’t wait,” she advises fellow creative alumni. “This was my plan a long time ago. I made a circle, and I did everything that I loved to do, but I don’t want to wait anymore.”