Biography
Tracey Trench is an award-winning content producer and experienced builder of global media businesses with a 30-year career in global entertainment. Her work has been nominated for Emmy and Tony Awards, and has won major awards from the Sundance Film Festival, duPont-Columbia Awards, and Rockefeller Foundation.
In 2011, Tracey was an early member of the leadership team at DreamWorks Animation Studio in Shanghai, where she was part of a small team that built the studio to over 200 employees, leading to a sale to Comcast/Universal in 2016. She then headed the entry of the Russo Brothers (directors of Marvel's Avengers movies) into Asia where the startup produced one of the highest-grossing Chinese movies of all time, Wolf Warrior 2.
For the past ten years, Tracey has focused on combining content and business creation for major media companies including Discovery Networks, Amazon, and others. She has built two separate content platforms for Discovery Networks in Asia and LATAM, and led a unique, worldwide wellness content platform founded by former professional athletes. She also produced over 200 episodes of content for these platforms.
Tracey continues to produce and/or oversee film, television, documentary and theater productions grossing over $1B globally. She has been the president of overall deals at Universal, Disney and MGM, and has produced films for all of the major studios. Passionate about exploring new technologies, she has well-tested story expertise, connections deep and wide in media and technology, and experience in international market complexity.
Early on, her skill at producing rich, commercial stories on limited budgets impressed then top Fox executives Peter Chernin, Bill Mechanic, and Chris Meledandri who offered her the opportunity to produce the Cinderella-themed film "Ever After." The film was shot in the medieval Perigord region of France, starring Drew Barrymore. It was a complicated shoot that involved actors and crew from five countries, international sales/lease-back deals and other production complexities. Tracey delivered the film on time and on budget. It became a sleeper hit for Fox, grossing over $100 million worldwide in 1998 and launching her producing career.
Tracey continued to produce films for Disney and Fox and soon after became President of Robert Simonds' company. Together, they set a goal of exploiting the under-served four-quadrant comedy market, producing a number of films including the comedy hits "The Pink Panther," "Yours, Mine and Ours," "Cheaper by the Dozen," "Herbie, Fully Loaded," and "Just Married." She later joined the Lead Producers team that took the classic Albert Maysles documentary 'Grey Gardens' and turned it into a Broadway hit. The show won three Tonys.
During her first job at Twentieth Century Fox, she helped develop and nurture the idea of franchise family comedies, including the original "Power Rangers" movies. She also financed and produced the award-winning documentary "Fear and Learning at Hoover Elementary," about a ten-year-old immigrant girl in L.A.'s poorest neighborhood. The film won the Freedom of Expression Award at the Sundance Film Festival, an Emmy nomination, and the DuPont-Columbia Award - given by the Pulitzer Prize committee. It is also listed by the Rockefeller Foundation as one of the top ten films on American race relations.
Tracey is a Harvard Business School guest lecturer, an advisor for UCLA's Producers Program and American Film Institute, and teaches storytelling and production masterclasses in North America and Asia. She was the Grand Judge of the inaugural Beijing International Screenwriting Competition and served for many years as liaison to the Hong Kong Trade Development Council and Hong Kong Filmart.
Tracey has a Bachelor of Arts degree with honors in Social Anthropology from Harvard University and a Master of Business Administration from UCLA Anderson School of Management. She started her Hollywood career as a researcher at Creative Artists Agency, soon becoming a studio executive at Twentieth Century Fox.
