Alumnus Traces Successful Writing Career to St. John’s Creative, Nurturing Environment

In reflecting on why he chose St. John’s, Mr. Bernardin, born in the Bronx and raised on Long Island, said, “The truth? I wanted to spend college close to home because of a girl. It was the best choice I ever made for the wrong reason.”

The future winner of the coveted Writers Guild Award (WGA), who worked on Star Trek: Picard, Batman: Caped Crusader and Stephen King’s Castle Rock, started as a business major. But that didn’t last long. 

“I was intensely unhappy because of my sweeping allergy to numbers and math,” joked Mr. Bernardin, who ultimately earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Communication Arts and currently lives with his family in Los Angeles, CA. “Thankfully, St. John’s was incredibly cool with me switching majors after my first semester—and my parents understood that I wouldn’t grow up to be an accountant like my father. That led to my love affair with the University.”

He remains grateful for the “gentle push” toward becoming a professional writer that he received from devoted faculty members such as Barry E. Sherman, Associate Professor, at St. Vincent’s College (now The Lesley H. and William L. Collins College of Professional Studies (CCPS)). “They encouraged me to focus on writing as a discipline,” Mr. Bernardin recalled.

His professors gave him a wide berth to pursue his imagination. “The best thing you can do for a writer who is 18 or 19 years old is encourage them to write. The best thing you can do for a creative person is enable them to create with as few restrictions as possible,” he said.

It also didn’t hurt to join St. John’s Society for Film and Visual Arts, and the TV Club. “These two organizations were incredibly fertile places to learn, where members could access equipment for their projects and collaborators were always on hand and ready to get to work,” said Mr. Bernardin.

“All of us in the TV Club or Film Society would pull crazy all-nighters, not because we had papers due, or theses to write, but because we had movies to edit or TV projects to mix,” he said. “The Television, Film, and Radio Center became a home away from home, populated by the weird, the wonderful, and the committed.”

His teachers further encouraged Mr. Bernardin and his fellow students to apply for internships and competitions as they continued to hone their skills. “I won the [radio, television, and film writer] Nate Monaster Writing for Television Competition, which took me to Hollywood, CA, for the summer between my junior and senior years, where I interned on shows on the Paramount lot,” he explained.

An internship he earned with guidance from St. John’s University Career Services led to his first postgraduate job, serving as an editor at Starlog, a small science-fiction magazine. 

In the years since Mr. Bernardin’s professional accomplishments have flourished. He was a film editor for the Los Angeles Times; held senior editing positions with The Hollywood Reporter and Entertainment Weekly; was a consulting editor for Fangoria magazine; oversaw Playboy.com; did freelance writing for outlets that include GQ, Wired, Details, Vulture, Empire,and Syfy.com; and wrote comic books for Marvel, DC, and Image.   

He was a staff writer for the Syfy Channel’s Alphas series, worked as a supervising producer on Starz’s The Continental, and was a producer on Carnival Row, Amazon’s Victorian fantasy series. In addition, he was a coproducer on Treadstone, the USA Network spy drama, and a staff writer on the first season of Castle Rock, an original series on Hulu.

“I found St. John’s to be a place of possibility,” Mr. Bernardin said. “It was a place where I had the freedom to discover who I wanted to be, surrounded by other people trying to do the same. It’s in the greatest city in the world, but not subsumed by it. It was exactly the environment that I needed.”