biography
Writer. Producer. Seeker.
Hannah Louise Shearer is well known as a writer in a variety of genres, with the unifying theme of exploring how people react under the pressure of challenging circumstances, and how that shapes their lives and their character. She gives her characters the opportunity to become more emotionally conscious about themselves, the people they relate to, and the world around them. During her time as Executive Story Editor for Star Trek, the Next Generation, she was recognized for her ability to evoke emotion and humanize outer space, and several of her lines have become famous quotes.
She wrote and produced the television series Emergency!, Knight Rider and Quincy and wrote for Cagney and Lacey, Tales of the South Seas, Pacific Blue, Island Sun and VIP. She was also a staff writer for daytime dramas, including General Hospital; Port Charles; Days of Our Lives; and The Bold and the Beautiful. She produced many television shows and movies of the week, including: the mini-series The Rebels, The Seekers, The Immigrants, and Condominium, as well as numerous pilots, including Nashville Beat, a two-hour television movie/pilot that she created, wrote and produced. She started her career on the police drama Adam-12, and later became the first female television line producer at Universal Studios.
Hannah has been a member of the Writer’s Guild of America, West since 1977. She was first published at the University of California, Berkeley, where she majored in Journalism and wrote for the Daily Californian. She continued with prose at Written By, the Maggie-award-winning Journal of the Writers’ Guild, where she created Muse-ings, a wide-ranging column about the writing life. A native Californian, Shearer lives in Los Angeles, where she is working on her second novel.