PATHWAYS

Organizations come to us with a mission, a mandate, or an imperative. We build the strategy, and then we build the thing. This has most recently looked like developing a hybrid episode series with Robert Wood Johnson Foundation about imagining healthier futures. In this work, we tend to see where attention is moving before the market agrees. From the onset, that has been the approach. In 2007 Nina commissioned original films for mobile phones on behalf of Sundance and coordinated the international technology partners who could deliver them, and was told, repeatedly, that no one would ever want to watch video on a phone.

Selected clients and partners: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation · Sundance Institute · Our Body Politic (NPR affiliate) · Pop Culture Collaborative · Starfish Accelerator · Dot Connector Studio · Benenson Strategy Group · Best Self Media · USC Annenberg School · Knight Foundation · Maynard Institute for Journalism Education

See who is missing from the room, then build the room. Nina co-founded New American Leaders in 2010, still the only organization in the country dedicated to training first- and second- generation immigrants to run for public office—building its brand, identity, and communications from the ground up. In New York City, working inside City Hall as Director of Communications for the Office of Immigrant Affairs under Mayor Bloomberg, Nina spearheaded the effort that made Immigrant Heritage Week a standing municipal commitment by executive order, then produced its inaugural citywide, multi-venue week of programming. We read the world through a global lens drawn from lived experience, and we bring it as the premise of a strategy. We are also pragmatic in a way this sector often isn't: mission-driven work burns people, and disproportionately people of color. We build budgets, teams, and timelines that account for it, because an organization that cannot sustain its staff cannot sustain its mandate.

Selected clients and partners: New American Leaders · Office of Immigrant Affairs, Office of the Mayor, City of New York · Maynard Partners · USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism · The Alliance for Children's Rights · Democracy Fund · Doris Duke Foundation · Hewlett Foundation

Founder, operator, board member, first money in — Nina has built companies and helped other people build theirs. Every venture we have touched was, at the time of engagement, either new to market or meaningfully differentiated within it: narrative VR production before it was a thing; escape rooms built with rigorous production value (Hatch Escapes is currently the number one escape room in Los Angeles); modular housing designed against veteran housing insecurity, statewide shortage, and fire-vulnerable geography; co-working built for Black women and their allies, who were not served by the default; an accelerator built to protect the intellectual property of creators of color in an industry that preys on it; brand and design for nonprofits and small companies that had neither the bandwidth nor the playbook. Nina’s ventures have consistently outlived our day-to-day presence in them, which is the point.

Ventures and roles: Hatch Escapes — Founder · Cassette Systems — Founding Advisory Board · Spensley + Ford — Co-Founder · New American Leaders — Co-Founder; Board Member · Lithic VR — COO · Blackbird House — Operations and Strategy · Starfish Accelerator — Program Co-Director

We produce the films that historically shouldn't have gotten made, and then we make sure they get seen. Our approach to production is about building architecture that can sustain and invigorate projects (budget, legal, contract, finance, post, distribution, festival strategy) because that unglamorous scaffolding is the only thing standing between a script and a screening. The work we take on tends to arrive slightly before its moment or land just under the radar. Peripheral is the word we use, and we mean it as a description of where the interesting work lives, and where fresh standards for storytelling might emerge.

Selected projects and partners: Sundance Institute (producer, Global Short Film Project, GSMA) · Ashes (dir. Ajay Naidu) · No Me Olvidaré De Ti (dir. Laila Petrone) · The Wannabe (dir. Althea Wasow) · The Blade Runner Phenomenon (dir. Boris Hars-Tschachotin) · Ambiance Man, MOCAtv (dir. Alix Lambert) · Stuart Croft