Producer Ted Hope To Co-Lead Arizona State University Program Centered On Management In Creative Industries

Matt Grobar

March 22, 2021, 5:23 PM·3 min read

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Ted Hope, the producer and former co-head of Amazon Movies, is joining the faculty of ASU’s Thunderbird School of Global Management. He will help lead an innovative new Los Angeles-based graduate program—namely, the Master of Arts in in Global Affairs and Management in the Creative Industries.

Launching this fall at the Herald Examiner building in downtown L.A., the program is tailored to those pursuing global leadership and management careers within film, television, new media, music, VR/XR/MR, gaming, design, dance, fashion, theater, sports, themed entertainment and the arts. It has been crafted via collaboration between Thunderbird and two other ASU colleges, The Sidney Poitier New American Film School and The Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts.

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As a professor of practice, Hope will impart wisdom gleaned from his 30-plus years of entertainment experience, sharing his knowledge of everything from development and production to executive stewardship, along with varying means of distribution in today’s entertainment marketplace.

First getting involved at ASU via its Film Spark initiative—which, since 2009, has connected students with filmmakers and entertainment execs—Hope will now serve at the university in numerous capacities. While helping to lead the MGCI’s first class, he will teach experienced professionals in Thunderbird Executive Education courses, along with select undergrad courses at The Sidney Poitier New American Film School.

Per the university, Hope will also spearhead a new Film Spark Global Vision Lab, “which is being designed to spur tomorrow’s business and content innovations while fostering a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive industry force.”

“The evolution of the creative industries continues to move on a seismic scale, requiring new outlooks, practices and processes, and on an increasingly more urgent basis,” Hope said. “Thunderbird, Herberger Institute, ASU and I share the same mission to not just always be learning and innovating but to make sure we measure ourselves on how inclusive we can be. Big change is coming and we are all going to be better prepared for it…Together I think we will spark a bonfire of opportunity.”

Added Thunderbird director general and dean Dr. Sanjeev Khagram: “Ted Hope is a unicorn—a vanguard global entertainment executive, a legend of independent film, and so much more. He’ll use his visionary storytelling talents and deep practical and entrepreneurial experience to help us produce a graduate degree like no other in the world while giving our students invaluable insights into 21st-century creative processes and enterprises.”

First joining Amazon in 2015, Hope led the streamer’s entry into feature-film production and acquisitions, shepherding past Oscar winners including Manchester by the Sea and The Salesman, as well as two of this year’s Oscar-nominated films, Sound of Metal and Time. Having produced over 70 independent films throughout his career, he currently has a number of major films in production, including the George Clooney-directed Tender Bar starring Ben Affleck, Tye Sheridan and Lily Rabe; the Vanessa Hope doc Invisible Nation; and Roger Ross Williams’ Cassandro starring Gael García Bernal.

Hope previously served as executive director of the San Francisco Film Society, also founding NYU’s Cinema Research Institute. Currently in its second edition, Hope’s indie film tell-all, Hope for Film: A Producer’s Journey Across the Revolutions of Indie Film and Global Streaming, remains a bestseller on college campuses.

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