This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Seattle U chapter.
Shonda Rhimes, the powerful showrunner and creator of all our favorite Thursday night shows (How to Get Away with Murder, Scandal, and Grey’s Anatomy) began her career with a degree in English and Film Studies from Dartmouth College. Before she created some of the most popular series on television she was an intern at Denzel Washington’s production company, Mundy Lane Entertainment, obtained a Masters of Fine Arts from University of Southern of California, and helped to write Princess Diaries 2. Since then she’s taken Hollywood by storm. Her first, most popular show, Grey’s Anatomy began it’s 12th season and her two newer shows Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder have also returned to ABC this fall.
- She is normalizing women in STEM fields.
- She is erasing the harmful “single story” (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ted talk) often assigned to women of color in the media by creating complex and compelling characters like Annalise Keating in How to Get Away with Murder and Olivia Pope in Scandal.
- She is critical of the business she works within: “The entire world is skewed from the white male perspective. If you’re a woman, they have to say it’s a female-driven comedy. If it’s a comedy with Latinos in it, it’s a Latino comedy. ‘Normal’ is white male, and I find that to be shocking and ridiculous.”
- She’s written a book that shares her super-powers coming out November 10th, 2015 called Year of Yes.
- She taught us to Dance it Out when things get rough.