There’s no ground as fertile as a child’s imagination. Friends and family of Caitlin Hodson ’12 saw her mind forever churning out colorful tales while growing up in Buffalo, New York.
It wasn’t enough to watch her favorite television shows like Rugrats, Arthur, and Recess. Hodson’s creativity needed to be fed, and she nourished it in the backyards and living rooms of her neighborhood.
She wrote musicals and performed them with her sisters and friends. When Hodson was 13, her parents, who supported her artistic flair, bought her a digital video camera that opened another avenue to her theater of dreams.
“My friends and I were making movies in every genre, and I was editing them,” she recalls. “They were so bad, but it’s about learning from your mistakes and making as much stuff as possible.”
Hodson now fuels the imagination of the current generation of kids as a story editor and writer for the popular Netflix series Gabby’s Dollhouse. She broke into the ultra-competitive business of children’s television more than a decade ago thanks to her writing skills, work ethic, personality, and the training she received at Denison as a cinema and English major.
Her television credits include work on Team Butterbean’s Cafe, Bubble Guppies, Blue’s Clues & You!, Octonauts, and Gabby’s Dollhouse, which features a cat-loving girl who shrinks herself into her dollhouse for magical adventures.
“I feel lucky having the chance to work in an industry that had such a big role in shaping my childhood,” says Hodson, a writer at Dreamworks.
She chose Denison on the reputation of its cinema department, which immerses students in every facet of filmmaking. Her two most notable projects, Empty Spaces, and Michael, Darling, were short films exploring adult themes that are galaxies apart from the animated world she now occupies.
Jonathan Walley, chair of the Denison cinema department, said the contrasting works demonstrate her range and maturity as a writer.
“Caitlin is one of my favorite students in my 20 years at Denison,” Walley says. “She took advantage of every opportunity she had here. She’s an interesting combination of a quirky, funny personality, which feeds into the fact she does a lot of writing for younger audiences while also being this really smart artist who’s driven and very serious about her work.”
The department invited Hodson to return to campus in 2017 to speak to students. While touring the Cinema House, she saw something she had written on a wall years earlier:
“In times of desperation, remember film is fun.”
The quote felt especially apt right after graduation, when Hodson relocated to New York and worked a series of unpaid internships. They were steps in the right direction, yes, but they weren’t paying the rent. She credits her parents, Jeremy and Eileen Hodson, for their encouragement and support.
And her love of children’s television never abated. A documentary she had watched at Denison on Pixar fanned the desire to work in animation, where there are no limitations to the fantastical quality of characters and storylines.
Hodson developed an idea for an animated series but found no one willing to listen to her pitch. Just as she was ready to move from New York, the Denison alumni network delivered a breakthrough.
Joe Rudge ’96, a prominent music supervisor whom she met during one of her internships, connected Hodson with Claire Curley ’96, a Nickelodeon executive at the time.
“I was 22 years old and had no idea what I was doing,” Hodson says. “I pitched my idea to Claire on the fly. She said it wasn’t right for her but added, ‘You’re a good writer, and we will get you a job at Nickelodeon.’ That was the turning point. I would not have my job without that Denison connection.”
Hodson loves collaboration, or as she terms it, “getting into the room” with other creative people. In 2014, as an executive assistant, she made quite an impression on Team Umizoomi executive producer Jennifer Twomey. When the show ended, Twomey promised they would work together again.
“She said, ‘and the next time, you’ll be a writer,’” Hodson recalls. “That’s the first time anyone said that to me, and I believed her.”
Years later, Twomey created Gabby’s Dollhouse and brought Hodson aboard as a writer.
Beyond her responsibilities to the show, Hodson is writing her first children’s novel. She’s also helped a good friend develop a pilot for a comedy series.
The breadth of her work dovetails with the advice she would give Denison students looking to find their way into the business.
“It’s important to always be creative with whatever you are doing, and to network with as many people as possible,” she says. “It didn’t happen for me right away, but you keep working at it. Now, I get to be creative every day with brilliant people. It’s become the career I’ve always wanted.”