Shannan E. Johnson calls herself a professional quitter, and the quitting is what built the career. She is a Houston native, a former television executive, and the chief executive of The Professional Pen, a Los Angeles script consultancy.
She graduated from Texas A&M in 2004 and quit a job there to spend a year in Los Angeles before graduate school. “I quit that job at Texas A&M so that I could come out to L.A. and just soak it all in,” she said. She became a television executive through the NBCUniversal Entertainment Associates program at Syfy, where she worked on Haven and Warehouse 13. In 2010 she quit to dance, and spent about eight years with Step Afrika! and Sole DEFINED and on the national tours of Amazing Grace and Ghost the Musical.
On September 20 she staged an immersive reading in Los Angeles of The Weight of Silence, a crime thriller she set in Houston’s Black rodeo culture. She hopes to film it at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo.
The actor Jason Dirden said she tests her methods before she teaches them. “She’s the experimental lab rat before she tells you this will work,” he said.
“You have to be vulnerable on the page if you want audiences to be vulnerable with your work,” Johnson said. What she wants is not only the film. “I just want to have an opportunity to continue to put Houston on the map,” she said. “But also to create jobs.”
