After selling her first TV show in India and completing UCLA’s Professional Program in Screenwriting, Puri is writing female-centered work shaped by dark comedy, empathy, and emotional complexity. Los Angeles has a way of asking every writer the same uncomfortable question: does the story still h old up when it leaves your own head? Himangini Puri arrived with years of movement behind her, a published poetry book behind her, and a sharper sense of what she wanted to write next. She had already learned how to perform feeling. Screenwriting asked her to do something else. It asked her to build characters who could walk into a scene, make a mess, and still make the audience lean closer. “I think screenwriting found me before I knew I was looking for it,” Puri says. “I had spent years telling stories through movement and poetry, but film gave me characters who could make the wrong choices and still be understood.” Puri is a writer, poet, screenwriter, choreographer, and multidisciplinary artist who specializes in poetry and screenplays, especially in dark comedy. Her work does not hurry toward clean moral lessons. She is drawn to characters who make a scene more interesting the moment they stop behaving the way the audience expects. That instinct shaped her first major step into screenwriting. Puri had not planned to enter the film industry. She had written privately, performed poetry, and built a long life in dance. Then young producers approached her about trying a screenplay. She had no formal screenwriting experience at the time. She said yes anyway. That first attempt became Heer, a dark comedy television show. Puri wrote seven episodes and later sold the series to Junun Motion Pictures, serving as head writer on the project. “I was thrown into the deep end very quickly,” she says. “There was no slow, graceful entrance. I wrote the pilot, then suddenly I was learning the industry while already inside it.” The pace unsettled her, but it also clarified something. She realized that screenwriting could hold the same contradictions she had been chasing in other forms. Dance had taught her how much a person can reveal without speaking. Poetry had taught her how to name the thing people usually avoid. Film gave her conflict, silence, timing, and women who did not have to be pleasant to be worth watching. “I am interested in women who are not easily explained,” Puri says. “That is usually where the story starts for me.” Puri’s current work is shaped by women whose lives are often flattened, dismissed, or made too polite. She writes female-centric films and characters she believes many women can recognize. She is especially drawn to the interior lives of women of color and women over 50, groups she feels are still too often pushed away from the center of the frame. For Puri, that exclusion does not only limit representation. It limits the imagination. “People sometimes think older lives are not exciting enough to know about,” she says. “I find that completely untrue. There is so much history, ego, shame, humor, longing, and unfinished business there.” Her second feature, now nearly complete, follows a 90-year-old female protagonist determined to fix everything but herself. It is the kind of premise that shows Puri’s taste for contradiction. The character is active, difficult, funny, and unresolved. She is not there to deliver a lesson about aging. She is there to be a person. Puri has also completed Nevermind, a feature she describes as an unlikely story about two exes. The project keeps her close to the territory she likes best: relationships that do not fit easy labels, people who know too much about each other, and humor that comes from pain rather than decoration. “Dark comedy lets me be honest without pretending pain is noble all the time,” Puri says. “Sometimes people are ridiculous because they are hurt. Sometimes they are cruel because they are scared. I like writing in that space.” Her move to Los Angeles in 2025 came with a clear intention. She enrolled in UCLA’s Professional Program in Screenwriting and has now completed it. The program gave her a more formal container for a skill she had first learned under pressure. It also placed her in a city where scripts are not treated as private documents. They are blueprints for something people may actually make. That matters to Puri. She has become more mindful of writing films that are not only emotionally sharp, but also possible to produce. She thinks about what happens after a script is sold. She thinks about whether a story can be made without losing the reason it mattered in the first place. “As writers, we can forget that the baton eventually passes to someone else,” she says. “I am trying to write with that in mind. I want the work to have feeling, but I also want it to be makeable.” Her artistic foundation still shows up in the way she writes, but it no longer needs to take over the story. Puri began dancing at age five with Kathak and later studied contemporary dance and ballet across Singapore, London, Malta, and Spain. That training taught her to read what happens underneath dialogue. It also taught her that a body can betray a character before the words do. “Dance taught me that the body gives people away,” she says. “A character can lie in dialogue, but the body often tells another story.” Poetry gave her another kind of discipline. Her book Unrooting, Musings of an Unsettled Psyche became an Amazon number one bestseller for a month and earned strong reader ratings on Amazon and Goodreads. She was later invited to speak on the Power of Poetry at TEDx, performed at the Festival of Libraries 2023 by invitation from the Indian Ministry of Culture, and won Silver Poetry Performance of the Year at IFP Season 14 for “Heavenly Body.” Those moments matter because they show that Puri’s voice had already traveled before she came to Los Angeles. Still, she is not trying to make screenwriting into a second version of her poetry. She is trying to write films that move, films that can be cast, shot, argued over, laughed at, and remembered. She has also been published by the Texas-based literary magazine Voices de la Luna and has a coming-of-age novel underway. The range is real, but right now the screen is asking the loudest question. “Art does not solve problems the way policy does,” she says. “It shifts the imaginative space where people begin to understand one another.” That is the kind of writer Puri is becoming in Los Angeles. Not someone trying to fit into the easiest version of the market. Not someone waiting for permission to write women who are strange, flawed, funny, aging, angry, tender, or impossible to summarize. Her next chapter is not about proving that these characters deserve a place onscreen. She writes as if that question has already been settled. The work now is to make the scripts strong enough, specific enough, and possible enough that producers can see what she sees: women’s lives are not niche material. They are stories with pressure, humor, history, and heat. For more information on Himangini Puri, visit her Instagram. The post Himangini Puri Came to Los Angeles With a Story. Hollywood Is Starting to Listen. appeared first on LA Weekly. ...read more read less