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Leslie Iwerks      

CEO and Creative Director of Iwerks & Co.

Leslie Iwerks is an Academy Award® and Emmy® nominated director and producer who currently serves as the CEO and Creative Director of Iwerks & Co., a Santa Monica based multimedia production company.

Iwerks creates critically acclaimed and award-winning documentaries, features and series that celebrate the genius, risks and rewards of creative visionaries, showcase heartfelt human tales, from the depths of the Guatemalan garbage dumps to the toxic tar sands of Alberta, Canada, and that document the human story of innovation and enterprise globally. An adventure and travel enthusiast, Iwerks has filmed on all seven continents around the world.

Her body of work encompasses feature films, such as The Pixar Story, Citizen Hearst, Industrial Light & Magic: Creating the Impossible, The Hand Behind the Mouse: The Ub Iwerks Story and League of Legends Origins, acclaimed environmental documentaries, including Recycled Life, Pipe Dreams and Downstream, and most recently, the in-depth docuseries, The Imagineering Story, which debuted on Disney+ in 2019.

Iwerks’ desire to innovate and push boundaries with her filmmaking has been cultivated and inspired by her family upbringing, as her grandfather, Ub Iwerks, was the original designer and co-creator of Mickey Mouse and a multi Academy Award®-winning visual effects pioneer, and her father, Don Iwerks, is also an Academy Award® winner for Technical Lifetime Achievement, and the founder of the large format film company, Iwerks Entertainment, which has built Iwerks large format theaters and projections systems in over 200 theaters around the world.

Iwerks is a graduate of the USC School of Cinema-Television and currently serves on the USC School of Cinematic Arts Alumni Council. She is an active member of the Academy of Motion Picture Documentary Branch, the Producers Guild of America, the Television Academy, the International Documentary Association, and serves on the board of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences Scientific and Technical Council and is Chair of the 2020 SciTech Public Presentations Subcommittee.

News

Selling Lies: What Documentarian Leslie Iwerks Found Fascinating About Fake News
While the term "fake news" gets thrown around so much it has become a buzz word, four years ago we learned that fake news was a real thing as many of the stories being shared on social media, most of them revolving around the presidential election, turned out to be completely untrue.
An Interview with Leslie Iwerks about her new film "Selling Lies"
The 2020 election is fast approaching, and voters are not only deciding whom to vote for, but also, what to believe. According to filmmaker Leslie Iwerks, understanding the truth in media can be “tricky.”
Leslie Iwerks On Making ‘The Imagineering Story’, Untold Secrets Of Disney’s Theme Parks, And Why Critics Initially Panned The Magic Kingdom
Leslie Iwerks has Disney in her DNA, so it should not be a surprise that the documentarian and Disney+ would find themselves joined at the hip for the remarkable six-hour, six-part docuseries The Imagineering Story, which chronicles the building and history of Disneyland and all that has come since in the world of Disney theme parks.
Filmmaker Leslie Iwerks Tells the Stories That Are Meant to be Told
Leslie Iwerks is an Oscar and Emmy-nominated documentary director and producer. Many of her films shed light on global issues, while others intrigue audiences with a behind-the-scenes look at the entertainment industry.
Leslie Iwerks Takes Audiences Through 50+ Years of ‘Imagineering’ Brilliance
Leslie Iwerks is no stranger to the Disney way of life. The daughter of certified Disney Legend Don Iwerks and granddaughter of animator Ub Iwerks (co-creator of Mickey Mouse and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit), Iwerks grew her documentarian career by exploring a wide variety of subjects ranging from environmental issues to William Randolph Hearst to, yes, many things Disney.

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