Chris Hoshnic

Chris Hoshnic is a member of the Navajo Nation tribe and in the final year of his Bachelors of Arts in English at Arizona State University. Originally from Sweetwater, Arizona, located seven miles south of highway 160, Chris attended Red Mesa Elementary School. He lived with his grandparents and his younger brother until he decided to live full-time with his mother and father in Phoenix, Arizona where they were attending school and working to make ends meet. He enrolled into Apollo High School and graduated in 2010. In 2013, he graduated with an Associates in Applied Science with a concentration in Video Production at Glendale Community College.
Chris then went on to write, direct and produce three short films and one unproduced feature film at various stages under his multimedia company C&M Imagine hoping to enter several prestigious film festivals. After several rejections, his 5-minute short film Ozzy, was accepted into the 2018 Jerome International Film Festival. After many failed projects, Chris decided to place emphasis on screenwriting alone. Doing so, he placed as a finalist in short screenplay competitions at Austin Micro Film Festival and the Phoenix Film Festival for Homecoming, a short story about a Navajo teenager trying to hone her superhero powers. Chris planned to produce it as a short film but ultimately decided against it to focus primarily on writing. Later in the next year, Chris wrote one feature-length screenplay and one TV pilot which both placed as finalists in the 2019 Shore Script Feature Contest and Page Turner Screenplay Competition respectively. Venturing outside of film, Chris decided to try playwriting, producing a one-man play he plans to later produce. This brought the attention of several Native American playwrights and in 2020, Chris was featured in the 4th Annual New Native Theatre Play Festival: Good Medicine alongside many established Indigenous artists. This inspired Chris to attend Arizona State University in hopes to obtain a Bachelors of Art in English to further study many forms of writing. As a result, he became a Fellow for the Emerging Dine Writers Institute in 2022 under his mentor Ramona Emerson and met several Navajo artists and writers. Chris is currently writing a horror fiction novel and planning to attend graduate school to further his studies in Creative Writing. He recently interned for Thousand Languages Project, a multilingual translation project and database of literary translation at Arizona State University. He assembled a community engagement piece, a multilingual community poem titled “The Landscapes of Languages” and presented it at the 2023 Northern Arizona Book Festival. He will also be translating published work with Thousand Languages from the Hayden’s Ferry Review, an international literary journal published by Arizona State University this coming fall. Chris is currently a film acquisitions intern at Octane Multimedia, a film distributor, agency and sales company based in Scottsdale, Arizona. Chris enjoys listening to podcasts, traveling, snowboarding and boxing. He currently resides in Surprise, Arizona where he works part-time for a local plumbing company while he attends school.