Sit down for a pitch meeting with international executive, Swati Shetty, of Imagine Entertainment!
Swati has a unique breadth of experience across business and creative, through multiple facets of the entertainment industry. She began her entertainment career at StarTV (Fox) in India, followed by Disney where she started as an executive on Disney Channels, then headed content distribution for Disney-ABC, and eventually led the studio team towards local productions. She moved on from Disney as President of Balaji Motion Pictures where she put together a successful slate of films starting with Dirty Picture, the first-ever female-driven film that had extraordinary success at the box office. Swati then produced Umrika , a drama feature, through her own banner Samosa Stories. The film went on to win India’s first Sundance award (2015) in addition to multiple other honors and awards. More recently, she moved to Los Angeles in 2016 as Netflix’s first employee from India to lead Originals and Acquisitions. She had much success during her time at Netflix, having worked on multiple shows and films. In May 2019, she joined Imagine Entertainment to lead their global expansion effort, which along with international content also focuses on global stories with intersecting worlds and characters.”
Imagine Entertainment was founded in 1986 by Brian Grazer and Ron Howard to create independently produced feature films, television programs and other original programming. Imagine’s productions have been honored with more than 60 prestigious awards including 43 Academy Award nominations and 195 Emmy® award nominations. Past productions include the Academy Award Best Picture winner A Beautiful Mind, as well as Grammy Award Best Film winner The Beatles: Eight Days A Week – The Touring Years. Additional films include Get on Up, Rush, J. Edgar, Frost/Nixon, American Gangster, The Da Vinci Code, Apollo 13, 8 Mile, Liar, Liar, Backdraft, and Parenthood to name a few. Recent films include The Spy Who Dumped Me staring Mila Kunis and Kate McKinnon which won of the 2018 People Choice Award for Best Comedy, and the documentary Pavarotti. Current film projects include the NY Times bestseller Hillbilly Elegy; tick, tick…BOOM! directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda; Curious George based on the beloved children’s character; a re-imaging of the hit films Friday Night Lights and Fear; a biopic about Gucci Mane; and the documentary Rebuilding Paradise ,which follows the community of Paradise, California, as it attempts to rebuild following the devastation of the 2018 California wildfires. Television productions include Fox’s Empire, Shots Fired and the 24 franchise, NatGeo’s Genius anthology series; NBC’s Parenthood and Friday Night Lights; Fox’s and Netflix’s Arrested Development, as well as HBO's From the Earth to the Moon, for which Howard and Grazer won the Emmy® for Outstanding Mini-Series. Current television projects in production include Wu-Tang: An American Saga (Hulu), Swagger (Apple), Why Women Kill (CBS All Access), and Filthy Rich (Fox). Ron Howard and Brian Grazer began their collaboration with the hit comedies Night Shift and Splash, and continue to run Imagine Entertainment as chairmen.