Creative content company Chromista, with bases of operation in L.A. and NY, has hired Adina Birnbaum as its EP of new business development.
Brooklyn-based Birnbaum began her career as a financial strategist for a leading hedge fund until she had an existential awakening. Ditching her forecasting models and power suits, she switched to advertising, landing her first gig in client services at the boutique editorial studio Breathe Editing, before joining BBDO as an assistant producer.
Birnbaum has since worked at agencies including Arts & Letters, DDB, Doubleday & Cartwright, EnergyBBDO, Johannes Leonardo, Mullen, and Sid Lee. Her brand work includes campaigns and identities for Adidas Originals, Aflac, The Atlantic, AT&T, Belvedere, Quaker, Kate Spade and Wrigley.
Birnbaum led the first in-house broadcast productions for Chobani and Squarespace and served as Instagram Marketing’s first freelance producer hire, establishing a production pipeline, process for platform content surrounding new product launches, and education initiatives.
Birnbaum has also been a creative EP at MPC, working on music videos for artists like Sia, feature films, fashion shorts, and integrated ad campaigns. She helped establish the New York post pipeline for feature films with Jon Watts’s Cop Car. She later post-produced two independent films for Netflix with the design and animation company Hey Beautiful Jerk. In the experiential world, she led a 3-store holiday pop-up for the Parisian luxury brand Hermès Petit H, involving the construction of large-scale custom interior merchandise display units, interactive holiday window displays, VIP events, printed collateral, and animation, which lived both in-store and online.
First-Time Feature Directors Make Major Splash At AFI Fest, Generate Oscar Buzz
Two first-time feature directors who are generating Oscar buzz this awards season were front and center this past weekend at AFI Fest in Hollywood. Rachel Morrison, who made history as the first woman nominated for a Best Cinematography Oscar---on the strength of Mudbound in 2018--brought her feature directorial debut, The Fire Inside (Amazon MGM Studios), to the festival on Sunday (10/27), and shared insights into the film during a conversation session immediately following the screening. This came a day after William Goldenberg, an Oscar-winning editor for Argo in 2013, had his initial foray into feature directing, Unstoppable (Amazon MGM Studios), showcased at the AFI proceedings. He too spoke after the screening during a panel discussion. The Fire Inside--which made its world premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival--tells the story of Claressa “T-Rex” Shields (portrayed by Ryan Destiny), a Black boxer from Flint, Mich., who trained to become the first woman in U.S. history to win an Olympic Gold Medal in the sport. She achieved this feat--with the help of coach Jason Crutchfield (Brian Tyree Henry)--only to find that her victory at the Summer Games came with relatively little fanfare and no endorsement deals. So much for the hope that the historic accomplishment would be a ticket out of socioeconomic purgatory for Shields and her family. It seemed like yet another setback in a cycle of adversity throughout Shields’ life but she persevered, going on to win her second Gold Medal at the next Olympics and becoming a champion for gender equality and equitable pay for women in sports. Shields has served as a source of inspiration for woman athletes worldwide--as well as to the community of... Read More