Howard A. Rodman is Vice President of the Writers Guild of America West.  

    His screen adaptation of Savage Grace, starring Julianne Moore, premiered in the Directors Fortnight section of the Cannes Film Festival in May, 2007 and was released domestically in 2008. It was nominated for a Spirit Award in the Best Screenplay category. August, from Rodman's original screenplay, starring Josh Hartnett, Rip Torn and David Bowie, was also released in 2008. In 2006, Rodman wrote a one-hour dramatic pilot for HBO entitled 213, for director Rodrigo Garcia and producers George Clooney, Steven Soderbergh, and Grant Heslov. Rodman's adaptation of the Joseph Mitchell book Joe Gould’s Secret was the opening night selection of the Sundance Film Festival in 2000 and was released that year by USA Films. In the course of his career he's worked with Soderbergh (who gave sleazy characters in the films The Underneath and Traffic the name of "Mr. Rodman") as well as with Maurice Sendak, Clive Barker, Chantal Akerman, David Lynch, Michael Lehmann, Peter Bogdanovich, Tom Cruise (whose directorial debut Rodman co-wrote), and the late Michael Jackson. He just completed an American adaptation of the Danish noir Terribly Happy, and is currently at work on a screenplay for Ben Stiller's company Red Hour and Twentieth Century Fox.

         He is an artistic director of Sundance Screenwriting Labs and advises the January and June labs in Sundance, Utah. He's also advised and directed labs in Parati, Brazil; Wadi Feynan, Jordan; Rocherfort and Vittel, France; and Kent, England.

    In addition to serving as the WGAW's vice president, Rodman was the founder and co-chair of the Guild’s independent screenwriters’ caucus. He was recently named a trustee of the Writers Guild Foundation. He has served as chair of Film Independent's Spirit Awards Dramatic Competition jury, and as chair of the annual USC Scripter Awards. Rodman serves on the Board of Advisors of the Huston School of Film and Digital Media in Galway, Ireland, and on the American delegation to the Franco-American Cultural Fund in Paris. He is a member of the Writers Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and is a Fellow of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities.

         His novel, Destiny Express has been published in the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany, Japan and Italy. It was blurbed by Thomas Pynchon, who termed it "Daringly imagined and darkly romantic -- a moral thriller." Rodman's screenplay F. was selected as one of "Hollywood's Ten Best Unproduced Screenplays" by Premiere magazine. He is the former editor-in-chief of The Cornell Daily Sun. His essays appear in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and on The Huffington Post. He has been a guest on the PBS Lehrer News Hour and on Elvis Mitchell's The Treatment.

         After serving for five years as Chair of the Writing Division, Rodman stepped down in 2007 to devote more time to teaching and writing.