WME Partner Ashley Holland Leaving To Join Onyx Collective
22.04.2022 - 02:45
/ deadline.com
EXCLUSIVE: Ashley Holland, a TV lit agent and partner at WME, is leaving the agency to join Onyx Collective, Disney’s curated content brand for creators of color and underrepresented voices. I hear her deal is still being finalized, and she will stay at WME for a few more weeks, but Holland is expected to be a senior scripted executive at Onyx.
WME President Ari Greenburg sent the a note to the agency this afternoon, announcing Holland’s career move.
“Ashley will be a superstar at Onyx, because everywhere she goes, she has tremendous impact,” he wrote. “We are sad to lose her, but we are so excited to watch her ascend at the Walt Disney Company as part of the leadership at Onyx.” (You can read his memo in full below the post.)
At Onyx, Holland will join her longtime client Prentice Penny, who has an overall deal there, and another A-list client, Ryan Coogler, who is one of the collective’s founders.
Holland had been at WME since 2017 and was named partner a couple of years later. In addition to Coogler and Penny, she represented such top-level talent as Boots Riley and Janelle Monáe and was involved in WME’s inclusion efforts.
A Stanford graduate, Holland started her career at CAA where she spent eight years, beginning as a floater and rising through the ranks to an agent. She serviced such agency clients as Ava DuVernay, Melina Matsoukas and Yara Shahidi and worked with Penny who followed her to WME. She also helped spearhead initiatives that champion diverse voices, like CAA Amplify.
Launched last May, Onyx, led by Tara Duncan, won its first Academy Award last month for Questlove’s feature doc Summer of Soul (…or, When the Revolution Could Not be Televised), which, like all of Onyx’s output, streams on Hulu.
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