For Hannah McMechan and Danya Jimenez, the journey to writing Netflix’s biggest animated hit of all time didn’t begin on a studio lot or in a pitch meeting. It began in the Loyola Marymount University campus’s classrooms, dorm rooms, and on student film sets, where collaboration mattered more than competition.
Today, Hannah and Danya (both class of 2018) are the writers behind “KPop Demon Hunters,” a globally successful animated feature about a K-pop girl band who secretly battle demons while navigating friendship, identity, and self-acceptance. The film has earned major industry recognition, sparked international fandom, inspired many Halloween costumes and turned the former LMU classmates into two of Hollywood’s most closely watched emerging voices. The film also earned them an award for Best Writing at last month’s Annie Awards, which honors excellence in animation.
But when they look back on their time at LMU, the writers don’t point to prestige or pressure. They talk about community and how that supportive environment shaped not only their careers, but how they work together to this day.
Choosing LMU and Choosing Collaboration
Both Hannah and Danya arrived at LMU as freshmen with big creative ambitions and very human anxieties about starting college. Like many students, they were weighing options, expectations and the idea of what success was “supposed” to look like.
“I do not thrive in an environment that is so cutthroat like that,” Danya says of more competitive film school cultures. “I thrive in love and community. Who wants to be on edge all the time? That sounds awful.”
That sense of community has become the foundation for everything.
“We all help each other and it honestly has kind of informed how we write with each other, and how we work with co-workers, how we try to bring up our friends. It really has just infiltrated our entire lives,” Danya says.
Hannah agrees, noting that while LMU may not always be the flashiest film school in industry conversations, its culture prepared them for the realities of professional storytelling.
“At LMU, you learn really quickly because you can start going on sets from day one,” she says. “Freshmen can go on set, which is something that doesn’t happen everywhere.”
That early, hands-on access helped demystify filmmaking and helped students see each other as collaborators and teammates rather than the competition.
Finding Friendship Before Finding a Writing Partner
Danya and Hannah met early in their freshman year, bonding almost immediately–but not over career goals.
“At that time, our headspace was not at all about our careers,” Hannah says. “We were both in survival mode, trying to make friends, trying to figure out college, being away from home for the first time.”
Though both are California natives–Hannah grew up in the woods outside Yosemite, while Danya is from Orange County–they initially believed they were creative opposites and didn’t write together during their first two years at LMU. They took the same screenwriting classes, but their creative instincts seemed different. One leaned more dramatic, the other more comedic.
“At the time, we were like, ‘We could never write together. We’re so different,’” Danya says with a laugh.
Looking back, they now see how similar their work actually was.
“All of our stuff was the same types of characters and stories,” Hannah says. “It was just slightly more dramatic or slightly more comedic. The same vibe.”
That realization wouldn’t fully click until later, but LMU gave them the space to grow individually before becoming a team.
A Semester Abroad and a Weird Subway Scene
The shift from friends to collaborators happened during a semester abroad in Budapest. They describe their lodgings as unusually intimate.
“We were staying in a lover’s hostel,” Danya says, laughing.
The housing arrangement placed the two of them in a single room where they shared a bed, while another student slept above them in what Jimenez describes as, “A bunk bed treehouse situation.”
Things got even weirder, though, when they started riding the Hungarian subway. In Budapest, the subway stations function as communal living spaces for the unhoused in a way that felt radically different from the U.S.
“It was like a dorm setup,” Danya says. “There were posters on the walls, mattresses. Basically, bedrooms within the subway system.”
This strange underground world prompted an idea for a TV show–one they would write together.
“We were like, we’re going to be hanging out together every single second of the day anyway. It just made more sense,” Hannah says. “We wrote a British mockumentary, which is not okay to have written because it’s about a group of unhoused people living in a subway system in London, which neither of us has ever experienced.”
They may not have ever experienced homelessness, but they saw a lot of it deep in the bowels of the Budapest Metro, proving you never know where inspiration will strike. Despite its unusual premise, the script was proof that they were good at writing together.
“It was a comedy, but with heart,” says Danya.
“Which is how we deal with most things, with heart,” says Hannah.
That script earned them a prestigious fellowship that helped them secure representation and opened the door to their first professional opportunities.
“That was the moment where it felt very clear,” Hannah says. “We were about to graduate, about to enter the real world, and suddenly this felt like a sign. Like, maybe we’re supposed to do this together.”
Learning By Doing and By Rewriting
After graduation, Danya and Hannah steadily built their careers as a writing team, developing projects for major studios and working in television writers’ rooms. They credit LMU with preparing them not just to write, but to rewrite–a skill that became essential on “KPop Demon Hunters,” which took years to develop.
One of the biggest lessons they carried from their education was the importance of clarity.
“We had versions of this movie that were incredibly complicated,” Hannah says. “And the biggest lesson we learned was always to simplify. If you’re confused, your audience is definitely confused.”
That instinct, to strip a story down to its emotional core, is something they say was encouraged at LMU, where professors and peers focused on character and theme over car crashes and spectacle.
In “KPop Demon Hunters,” that meant centering the story on shame and self-acceptance, rather than overloading the story with mythology. It’s a choice that resonates with audiences worldwide and one that reflects the writers’ own experiences of growing up, finding confidence and learning to trust their voices.
Coming home to Westchester
Recently, Danya and Hannah returned to LMU for a special screening of “KPop Demon Hunters” at Mayer Theater, followed by a conversation with students eager to follow in their footsteps. Sitting in the same neighborhood where their careers began, the moment felt surreal.
“It’s crazy to come back and realize how much LMU shaped us,” Danya says. “We’re still best friends with so many people we went to school with. That community doesn’t go away.”
For students and families in Westchester, their story is a reminder that global success can grow out of local roots–and that a supportive environment can be just as powerful as ambition.
As Hannah reflects, “People in this industry don’t really care where you went to school. What they care about is how you work, how you collaborate, and whether you have a voice.”
Thanks to their years at LMU, Danya and Hannah found all three, which carried them from Westchester to screens around the world.
Pictured at top: Hannah McMechan and Danya Jimenez have reached global success as the writers of Netflix’s most watched movie of all time, KPop Demon Hunters, with more than 325 million views. Photo by Jamal Reeves.
By Shanee Edwards.