Award winning writer/producer Bruce C. McKenna adds the upcoming highly anticipated HBO mini-series, The Pacific, to an already impressive list of credits. McKenna created the project, serving as co-executive producer and writing the majority of episodes for the series which was also produced by Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman. McKenna previously partnered with HBO and Messrs Spielberg, Hanks & Goetzman when he wrote episodes for the Emmy-Award winning mini-series, Band of Brothers, which garnered him a WGA Award, an Emmy nomination and a finalist for the Humanitas Prize.

For the big screen, McKenna has sold numerous original pitches and has written several studio film assignments, including the adaptation of Once Upon a Distant War for Jerry Bruckheimer Films and The Perfect Mile for Kennedy/Marshall and Universal. He has worked with such distinguished directors as Ridley Scott, David Fincher and Frank Darabont among others.

In the theater world McKenna, along with his wife Maureen, produced off and off-off Broadway plays in New York, where they had the pleasure of producing Neil LaBute’s first commercial play, Filthy Talk for Troubled Times.

McKenna has traveled extensively all over the world, including Central & South Americas, Polynesia, Japan, Northern Europe, England, France and the old Soviet Union. He worked abroad in Egypt on a paleontology expedition and in Pakistan as a journalist. He was the first Western journalist to write about the then burgeoning post-Soviet, Russian anti-Semitic movement Pamyat for the New York Times and Arete Magazine. Additionally he penned several articles on Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and Pakistan for Arete Magazine as well as The National Review, for which he also interviewed Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. His first book, “The Pena Files” – the true story of the world’s highest paid private investigator, Octavio Pena, the only man to ever successfully infiltrate both the Mafia and the IRS – was published by ReganBooks and Harper Collins.

Born and raised in Englewood, New Jersey, McKenna is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Wesleyan University where he majored in European history. Upon graduation he received the Dutcher History Prize and was nominated for University Honors, Wesleyan’s highest academic award. Later he attended Stanford University’s PhD program in Russian and Soviet history, focusing on early Twentieth Century Russian Fascism. He left Stanford, however, to become a freelance writer focusing on politics and foreign affairs.