About

Hi! I’m Emma Cohan,
Originally from the U.K., I built a creative career in Los Angeles before becoming a mum and rediscovering my lifelong passion for writing.

My Backstory:

I’ve been traveling to the United States since 1993, visiting family who had moved here to work in film, and over time those trips made the country feel like a second home. In 2002, I stepped into my own chapter here on a J-1 work visa, spending eighteen months with an American beauty-products company. I rotated through the office, marketing, and photography departments, absorbing everything from product shoots and campaign planning to the fast-paced environment of a creative team. Along the way, I taught myself Photoshop, retouching, and the technical craft behind an image, and discovered something unexpected: visual storytelling wasn’t just part of the job, it was the beginning of a lifelong creative pull.

When my program ended, I wasn’t ready to leave that world behind. I transitioned into life in Los Angeles as an international student and enrolled at Santa Monica College to study photography, a chapter that grounded me creatively and gave me the confidence to pursue storytelling with intention.

My first major break came when a friend connected me with HBO’s West Coast office. I joined as support for an executive who worked closely with network partners and cable providers. It was an electrifying environment, fast, collaborative, and deeply tied to how stories reach audiences, and it sharpened my sense of how narrative and strategy work together behind the scenes.

From there, stepping into commercial photography was a natural progression. I spent the next chapter of my life working on campaigns across Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Miami, creating billboards, magazine covers, promotional images, and on-set TV stills. Every project taught me something new about emotion, framing, and the tiny choices that make an image and a story resonate.

Motherhood shifted my creative center in a different direction. It made me more attuned to the inner lives of women, the identities we inherit or outgrow, the secrets we hold, and the pressures to be everything at once. That evolution is what eventually drew me from visual storytelling into writing.

Today, while raising my son and building my fiction career, I also work part-time in event operations with a women-led team supporting Million Meal Pack events across the United States with US Hunger and the Kroger Foundation. That work keeps me grounded in community, resilience, and the strength of everyday families, threads that run through all of my writing.

In recent years, I’ve written and published personal essays in Chicken Soup for the Soul, which reignited a dream I’ve carried since childhood: to write novels.