John Shiban

The American Film Institute doesn't get as much ink as USC and UCLA for Hollywood success stories, but it produces them all the same. In fact, it was after earning a B.A. at UCLA that John Shiban continued on to a Master's in screenwriting at AFI, where he was honored with a Paramount Fellowship and Mary Pickford Scholarship. He barely missed a beat after his training, joining the sci-fi drama about two FBI agents probing the world of oddity in "The X-Files" as a staff writer and eventually becoming a producer.

Shiban's TV writing career has remained virtually uninterrupted since then as a writer-producer with the virtual reality wargame simulation drama "Harsh Realm," the " X-Files" spinoff "The Lone Gunmen," the prequel series "Star Trek: Enterprise," "Supernatural," following two brothers desperately trying to find their father while battling inexplicable evils, and more. In 2009, Shiban reunited with his former "X-Files" co-producer Vince Gilligan on the AMC drama "Breaking Bad," centered around a high school chemistry teacher with criminal inclinations, working as a writer-producer on Season Two and as a consulting producer on Season Three. He followed this with yet another episodic stint, the sci-fi "Torchwood" about an institution investigating the extraterrestrial. Shiban is very much a small screen-focused artist, with but a few minor feature film credits interspersed throughout his very impressive TV resume.