HAARTS 2025

List of 4 news stories.

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  Marcelina Chavira ’03

  TV WRITER AND SKETCH COMEDIAN

  Los Angeles, California

    
  

  Marcelina Chavira ’03 was conceived during a ham-fueled moment of passion over an Easter Holiday weekend in Eagle Pass, Texas. She spent her formative years in Dallas scaring her friends' more conservative parents with her passion for NPR. Marcelina attended Bryn Mawr College and received an MA in Performance Studies from New York University. Her undergraduate and graduate work focused on post-colonial theory and the performance of identity and ethnicity. She then decided against a Ph.D. and moved to Los Angeles, California, to become a cartoon. 

   

  But cartoons are not real. So, she resigned herself to writing and has since found a wonderful home in sketch comedy. Marcelina writes, performs, and directs sketch comedy at Upright Citizen’s Brigade and The Pack Theater. 

   

  Marcelina’s pilot, Macho Libre, was included on The Black List inaugural Latinx TV List. Her credits include Amazon's Upload and Netflix’s Super Giant Robot Brothers. Most recently she has written for a Texas-based animated series on Hulu, which is scheduled to premiere in fall 2025. 
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  CJ Hoke ’09

  FREELANCE WRITER/SCRIPT COORDINATOR

  Warner Bros. Television

  Los Angeles, California

   

  CJ Hoke '09 has written for Shrinking on AppleTV+ and General Hospital on ABC, and she is the executive producer of the film After We’re Over, which won the Audience Choice Award for Best Narrative Feature at SLIFF in 2021.
   

  Her one-act play, Playground Games, about a pinky promise gone awry, won Best Play (English) at the 2024 Short x Sweet Hollywood Festival. Additionally, her one-act play, Snow, which is about fictionalized archivists reassembling the tattered records of an impulsive President, won the Encore! Producers Award at the 2019 Hollywood Fringe Festival. Her comedy pilot Hookers won the JHRTS Script Competition for Best Half-Hour Pilot in 2022.

   

  A double-honors graduate of the University of Chicago with degrees in French Language & Literature and Theatre and Performance Studies, CJ writes women-driven comedies with heart, exploring the conflicts between who her characters are and who they believe themselves to be.

  
  

   
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  Ashley Holland ’04

  CREATIVE DIRECTOR, STYLIST AND PRODUCER
  

  Senior Vice President, Scripted Series

  Onyx Collective (a Walt Disney Company)

  Los Angeles, California

   

  Ashley Holland ’04 is senior vice president of Scripted Series at Onyx Collective, a premium content brand under Disney Entertainment that focuses on artists of color and underrepresented voices with programming exclusively available to stream on Hulu in the U.S. and Disney+ internationally. She leads the development and production of Onyx Collective’s scripted series and specials across all programming categories and formats and oversees the department’s day-to-day operations.

   

  Ashley joined Onyx Collective in 2022 from WME, where she was a partner who represented Prentice Penny and Ryan Coogler (both with Onyx Collective overall deals), as well as top-level talent like Halle Berry, Janelle Monae, Mara Brock Akil, Riz Ahmed, and more. She was intimately involved in the selling of shows like HBO’s A Black Lady Sketch Show and Starz’s P-Valley, and she was instrumental to WME’s growth as a company to develop its next generation of leaders and their diversity and inclusion efforts. Ashley also worked intimately with independent studio clients like Media Res (The Morning Show) and Macro TV Studios (Raising Dion). She started her career at CAA, where she spent eight years rising through the ranks to agent in the television department and helped spearhead initiatives like CAA Amplify that champion connectivity for high-level, diverse executives and influencers.

   

  She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences as well as the Television Academy. In 2021, Ashley was named in Variety’s annual Women’s Impact Report, and in 2020, she was included in The Hollywood Reporter’s Next Gen list of 35 Rising Executives Under 35. She received her bachelor’s in urban studies and her master’s in communications from Stanford University in 2008.
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  Alex McAtee ’01

  EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT (EVP)

  Point Grey Pictures 

  Los Angeles, California

   

  Dallas native Alex McAtee ’01 is a lover of all things laugh out loud funny with a touch of teary-eyed sentimental romance. Her claim to fame came as an extra in the film Bottle Rocket at the age of 12, and her most starstruck moment was when she met icon filmmaker Amy Heckerling.

   

  Alex moved to Los Angeles soon after turning 21 and quickly moved up the ranks in various jobs within the entertainment industry. She finally felt she had a place to call home when she entered the doors of Point Grey. With her intelligent approach to material and very likeable style, she garners the trust of the filmmakers with whom she closely works.

   

  Alex has served as a producer in some capacity on many of the company’s projects including The Interview, Sausage Party, The Disaster Artist, Long Shot, and An American Pickle. Most recently, Alex produced the first season of Sausage Party: Foodtopia on Amazon Prime. Her upcoming projects include Wrong Girls, a Kristen Stewart/Alia Shawkat stoner comedy, and Par for the Course, a gender swapping screwball comedy written by and starring Quinta Brunson and Stephanie Hsu.