Inaugural BRIC Summit Supports Next Gen Creative Leaders

A new event aimed at uplifting a new generation of diverse talents, BRIC Talent and Innovation Summit will hold its inaugural edition on Saturday, February 9 in Downtown Los Angeles.The all-day interactive summit will bring together a community of thought provokers and industry disruptors from different facets of the entertainment and tech industries for an exciting day of crowdsourcing ideas and workshopping solutions. The event will be held at the Hungarian Cultural Alliance from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Tickets available here.

Founded by entertainment industry heavyweights Alison Mann, VP of Talent for Illumination; Jill Gilbert, Head of Creative Affairs for Luma Pictures; and producer Nicole Hendrix, BRIC (Break, Reinvent, Impact and Change) was created with the mission of creating new access points for women and members of underrepresented groups to excel at creative leadership and to enable cultural change through engaging and empowering talent.

The 2019 BRIC Talent and Innovation Summit will bring together more than a dozen venerated speakers from myriad arenas. The event’s organizers seek to create actionable items that can be taken back to each speaker’s respective organizations to either be implemented or shared as ideas to affect change.

The day’s presenters will include keynote speaker Stephen Galloway, Executive Features Editor of The Hollywood Reporter; directors Jorge Gutierrez and Trisha Gum; David Levine of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory; and producers including Monica Lago-Kaytis, Latifa Ouaou and Jasmine Jaisinghani; along with WGA award-winning writer Sameer A. Gardezi; Jinko Gotoh, Executive Producer and Co-President of Women in Animation; and closing speaker Karen Horne, SVP of Programming Talent Development and Inclusion for NBCUniversal.

Other speakers include Cal State Long Beach Director of the School of Art Aubry Mintz, Free the Bid’s Executive Director Emma Reeves, Executive Producer of Illumination Maggie Malone, SVP of Creative for Illumination Zaid Al-Asady, EVP of Development for Sony Animation Karen Toliver, Abrams Artists Agency literary agent Karen Kirkland, Head of Animation for CalArts Maija Burnett, journalist and host Michaela Pereira, Artist Lead for Sony Animation, Miguel Jiron, Founder and Director of the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative Stacy L. Smith, Ph.D., Executive Director of NewFilmakers, Larry Laboe, and Matt Waynee of USC Media Arts & Engineering.

The 2019 BRIC Talent and Innovation Summit is sponsored by Illumination, Sony Pictures Animation, Walt Disney Animation, Luma Pictures, Nickelodeon, Armed Mind, Snap, PSYOP and Women in Animation (WIA).

On-site childcare will be available at the event through BRIC Partner, Collab&Play. They both share the vision that in order for “a work environment to be genuinely inclusive; childcare needs to be part of the conversation.”

For more information on BRIC, visit www.bricfoundation.org.