THE G.Y.M.
Dani Hanks
When Valerie inherits her family’s run-down gym—still reeling from its previous owner’s exotic-bird-laundering arrest—she bets everything on a ragtag staff of lovable idiots to save the place from foreclosure, a cutthroat corporate competitor across the street, and their own spectacular incompetence.
WRITER
Dani Hanks (they/she) is a disabled writer/director based in NYC. Their workplace comedy pilot, THE G.Y.M., won the 2024 Austin Film Festival and will be featured on Table Read at the official podcast stage of SXSW 2026.
Dani grew up elbow-deep in human organs at their mom’s pathology lab in Porterville, California. A direct result of inhaling too much formaldehyde in their formative years, they dove headfirst into the entertainment industry and received a BFA in Drama at NYU Tisch.
Drawing from their experience as the only purple-haired snowflake in a deeply conservative family, they promote empathy for underrepresented identities through offbeat stories centered around diverse found families. Dani approaches the taboo with both levity and nuance and loves finding humor in the mundane.
Dani has worked on projects in development at FilmRise and RKO, and is a fellow of Stowe, Disability Belongs, and the WGAE SSTP. They are a full-time meme connoisseur, part-time AD, former member of Mensa, and have 10 years of experience cutting animal tissue for medical research (much to the dismay of their pet rats).
CAST
Heather Foster
Narrator
Allison Dunbar
Valerie
Shaan Sharma
Wade
Kensington Tallman
Alexa
Amy Bailey
Mary
Jacob A. Ware
Bryan
Yasmine Al-Bustami
Kayla
Brian Villalobos
Chris
Joe Nemmers
Gary