Daily Inspiration: Meet Seda Anbarci

Today we’d like to introduce you to Seda Anbarci.

Hi Seda, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I’m originally from Istanbul. I was writing stories in my childhood journals long before I understood that it could be a career, but I studied Chemical and Biological Engineering. I also wrote plays and lyrics, so writing kept finding its way into whatever else I was doing. A summer screenwriting workshop brought me to Los Angeles, and after finishing engineering, I came back to LA for my MFA degree in Screenwriting at New York Film Academy.

Since then, I’ve co-written and directed Here We Are, a romance web series with over 250,000 YouTube views, created, written and directed the audio drama Bonnie Screws Up, and co-written the web series Hot Yoga Sundays. Along the way, my Hidden Blood TV pilot script won at the Fantasy/Sci-Fi Festival, received a Screenplay Festival honorable mention and became a ScreenCraft Fellowship semifinalist. Starfall was a 2023 ScreenCraft Sci-Fi & Fantasy finalist and a 2024 Creative World Awards finalist, and Bonnie Screws Up was nominated for the 2022 Audio Verse Awards.

My films and series have picked up recognition too. Real Connections earned Best Indie Filmmaker at Top Shorts and the Women Empowerment award at Roma Short Film Festival. Here We Are won Best LGBTQIA+ at Paris Play and Best Web or TV Series at 4theatre Selection, alongside honorable mentions from Hollywood Gold Awards and London Movie Awards. Frank and Crystal and Proxy received Hollywood Gold Awards for web series and sci-fi, respectively. Spotted won Best Experimental Film at Top Shorts and awards at Global Shorts, while Here We Are and Cheers received Best Shorts Awards of Recognition.

Most recently, my original fantasy romance The Last Forbidden Hybrid won the UK’s 2026 Vertical Pilot Fund from First Flights and Vortex. Dan Löwenstein will direct the ten-episode pilot. After writing vertical series for other companies, I now get to see one of my own original series brought to the screen.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It hasn’t been easy. One of the harder adjustments has been the pressure to make everything “perform.” I come from longer stories, where you spend time with characters and build entire worlds. Now suddenly, I’m also also thinking about algorithms, follower counts and whether somebody will scroll away in three seconds or not.

I’ve had to learn how to work within that without losing the things that made me want to write. In vertical series, that becomes a very specific problem: how do you make someone NEED the next episode while still giving the character a believable reason for what they do? There’s a lot of rewriting inside those very short episodes and it’s an art of its own that I was not taught in school. So, a lot of that learning happened through actually writing them, getting notes and rewriting again.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I’m a screenwriter and fiction writer, drawn to fantasy, sci-fi, romance, horror and complicated women who don’t fit the roles they’ve been given. I love creating morally grey characters and worlds where questions about identity and power become very personal.

Recently, I’ve been writing vertical dramas, short serialized stories made for phones, and interactive fiction stories for mobile games. For DramaWave and Vigloo, I’ve developed original several fantasy series, shaping the character arcs, dialogue and cliffhangers. I also write for Chapters mobile game app these days.

I recently won the UK’s 2026 Vertical Pilot Fund, run by First Flights and Vortex, with my original fantasy romance The Last Forbidden Hybrid. Dan Löwenstein will direct the ten-episode pilot. After writing verticals for other companies, I now get to see one of my own worlds filmed.

I’m most proud of using what I’ve learned about mobile-first short dramas to start adapting my own feature film and TV scripts into the format to get them made faster and find the right audience. The Last Forbidden Hybrid was one of those adaptations.

Can you talk to us about how you think about risk?
Choosing screenwriting after studying engineering was a major risk for me. I was moving countries and starting a career without a clear route from graduation to a job. I’d tried screenwriting in a summer workshop first, so I had some experience of the work before committing to it.

Then doing my MFA in Screenwriting truly made me the writer that I am today. I’ve had so many great teachers who taught me how to build complicated characters, let their choices drive the story, and understand why an audience keeps watching. What makes someone care about this person? What are they hoping will happen, or afraid might happen? Those questions stay with me whenever I write.

Transmedia was my favorite subject during my education. We explored how a story world could grow through web series, comic books and games, and how each format changes the audience’s experience. Our teacher was a producer who made an Emmy-winning web series, so we were learning from someone who had explored those non-traditional formats firsthand. I loved thinking about all the different ways a world and its characters could reach people.

That’s a big part of why I could adapt to short vertical dramas so quickly. I had a foundation in traditional screenwriting, alongside experience thinking across formats. So, when I started writing verticals, I could build on that while learning the different pacing, episode structure and ways of keeping an audience involved.

I like understanding what I’m getting into, even when I can’t know how it will turn out. Learning how something works gives me the confidence to try it, without needing to know exactly where the story will lead me. The engineering hasn’t disappeared, either. I once worked out a theoretical water-compression device for a sci-fi screenplay. I still want to invent things, but I want the characters and a world I imagined involved.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.sedaanbarci.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sedaniore
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seda-anbarci/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@sedaniore

Image Credits
Shranjay Arora, Seda Anbarci, Kathrin Asmus.