Sami Tahari has joined Imaginary Forces’ L.A. studio as director of business development. Tahari brings extensive marketing, business and product development experience spanning the tech and entertainment spaces. Tahari previously served as partner manager at Google, where his team built the Google Glass at Work enterprise division from the ground up. His Google career kicked off as a program manager for the Glass Creative Collective, an experimental initiative, which partnered YouTube and top film schools to create awareness and media buzz for Google Glass. Under Tahari’s watch, the program saw the release of several popular online film and gaming projects, including Seeds, a Mother’s Day-themed short from USC that went viral (2.8M YouTube views); Pumpkin Zombie, a Halloween-themed short, which Tahari wrote and produced; and Grace Plains, an augmented reality game developed by UCLA in conjunction with YouTube. Tahari broke into the world of entertainment at Lionsgate, where he worked on the international marketing team for indie films and blockbuster titles, such as The Hunger Games….
Cutters Studios New York has promoted Julia Pepe to director of business development for the U.S. East Coast. The announcement was made by executive producer Elizabeth Krajewski and managing director Craig Duncan. Pepe joined Cutters in New York in 2014 as a producer, following previous stints with mcgarrybowen in Chicago as producer and studio manager. Cutters named her senior producer in 2015, and over this span, she has contributed to projects for the United Nations, the Museum of Modern Art, major agencies, publishers and media companies worldwide, many direct-to-client projects for NHL and others, and for several feature film and episodic television projects….
