Gabriela Gabašová: From the boards that mean the world to the formats that move the screen
Gabriela Gabašová comes from Považská Bystrica, but she has been living and working in Prague for several years now. Her path led from the Bratislava Conservatory and a brief study of film and television dramaturgy and screenwriting at VŠMU to DAMU, where she spent several years studying directing and dramaturgy. Alongside her studies, she began to write — for radio, for friends at FAMU, for theatre. She adapted books, revised scripts, and wrote her own plays. After finishing school, she smoothly transitioned into practice, directing theatre productions, continuing to write for radio, and devoting herself to musical composition.
Her desire to write for television and film, however, never disappeared. It simply waited patiently for the right moment. When information about the CME Content Academy started appearing on Instagram, Gabriela didn’t just scroll past. She had been following it since previous years, and the program made sense to her because it connects education with the concrete needs of television and offers a close look into project development. She prepared her application alongside theatre and radio assignments — perhaps that’s also why she succeeded in the admissions process.
She applied to the program as a screenwriter, but she entered it already as an accomplished director with a theatre background and musical education. Within the fiction track, she is now developing a script with her classmate Stanislav Slovák — one she would ideally direct herself one day. At the same time, she is strongly drawn to the R&E field. Lectures and workshops with Kateřina Pavlík and Eva Krutáková opened up an entirely new way of thinking about how to work with reality, themes, and participants so that a format isn’t just ordinary entertainment, but a thoughtfully crafted creative product. In R&E, she is already trying out the role of story producer and dramaturg, often in a “learning as we go” mode — which she prefers to long theoretical discussions without practical impact.
She sees the main difference from DAMU in the degree of focus. Theatre school gave her a strong classical foundation — literature, the history of drama, artistic movements, the ability to build a project from scratch and handle everything independently. CME Content Academy, on the other hand, aims directly at contemporary television practice — a large amount of concrete information, an emphasis on process, production, rights, and formatting. For some it may be overwhelming, but for her it’s a welcome opportunity to complement an area she previously relied on mostly intuitively. Gabriela speaks with respect about the lecturers, who combine expertise with clear, structured explanation. She mentions sociologist Martin Buchtík, whose approach she “carries in her head” every day, as well as TV Nova’s Head of Development Michal Reitler, his systematic approach, and his ability to precisely identify problems. In the R&E team, she values the atmosphere — because she feels safe there, her creativity opens more easily, and she is not afraid to take risks even at an early stage of an idea.
In the future, she would love to develop a new R&E format or work on true-story projects. She is fascinated by stories grounded in reality that still allow for strong authorial interpretation — whether it’s the MMA world or the fate of a remarkable personality, such as a musician. Music plays a significant role in her thinking: she composes for theatre, has worked on a documentary, and is preparing an opera. The idea of combining writing, dramaturgy, and composition in a single television project therefore feels like a natural next step.