Biografia
Anneka Jones is a veteran unscripted television producer and executive. Over an impressive 20-year span, she helped build Left/Right into one of the most venerated and versatile production companies. Left/Right has collected numerous awards - Emmy, Peabody, Critics Choice, NAACP Image, Cinema Eye, Television Critics Association, SXSW Special Jury, to name a few - for its wide-ranging body of work, from investigative journalism to reality TV. Anneka has had a hand in every Left/Right production since its inception in 2005, from developing and pitching ideas, staffing and retaining personnel, scheduling and budgeting projects, managing relationships with partners and buyers, to hands-on producing of thousands of hours of television.
Prior to joining Left/Right, Anneka directed and produced observational documentaries for MTV, including True Life, Diary, and Choose or Lose. She brought her keen sense of character development and episodic story arcs to Left/Right, where she was instrumental in developing and producing Exiled, a genre-busting MTV series that took privileged American teenagers to live with indigenous tribes all over the world. She was also integral to developing and producing Showtime's adaptation of This American Life, based on the wildly popular public radio show.
Those early successes forecasted Anneka's consistent role as someone who takes a kernel of an idea and turns it into a long-running series. On the commercial end of the unscripted spectrum, she took AMC's The Walking Dead star Norman Reedus' love of motorcycles and turned it into a seven-season globe-trotting success, Ride with Norman Reedus, and she took HGTV's desire for more aspirational locations and turned it into twenty seasons of Hawaii Life, Caribbean Life, Mexico Life, and Island Life. On the journalistic end of the unscripted spectrum, she helped build the production model that enabled Showtime's political follow-doc The Circus to break the quick-turn, longform mold.
As the industry evolved, Anneka has proven herself capable in any unscripted genre. She has partnered with filmmakers on a variety of documentary features and premium limited series, including Gutsy (Apple TV+), Celtic City (HBO), The Murdochs: Empire of Influence (CNN), and Batali: Fall of a Superstar Chef (Discovery+).
Anneka specializes in building relationships with real people - from primary subjects to journalists and celebrities - and giving shape to their stories. Often, that also means gaining the trust and navigating the concerns of organizations of all shapes and sizes, from high-end consumer brands to high-security prisons. She manages the individual and group stakeholders of every project with equal care, and it shows in the access she's been granted. For journalistic projects, Anneka forges co-production partnerships with various intellectual property holders such as The New York Times, Conde Nast Entertainment, and Vox Media Studios.
Anneka's ability to both develop and produce made her an indispensable executive at Left/Right and a trusted partner to buyers. Over her tenure, she was promoted from Head of Development to Executive Vice President of Current & Development, and most recently to Chief Content Officer. In each role, she has always juggled the full development slate with 'soup to nuts' executive producing. Networks know her not just as a developer and pitcher, but as a reliable partner through the entire marathon run that is series production.
Anneka holds an interdisciplinary Master's Degree in the Social Sciences from the University of Chicago and a Bachelor's Degree in Sociology and Filmmaking from Sarah Lawrence College.
