Wayne Brady and Collaborators Mandie Taketa and San Heng to Keynote BRIC Summit (Exclusive)
The think tank conference also will feature a fireside conversation between Karen Horne and Jeanell English, former DEI execs at Warner Bros. Discovery and the film Academy, respectively.
By Rebecca Sun - March 6, 2024
Wayne Brady: The Family Remix’s Wayne Brady, Mandie Taketa and San Heng will jointly deliver the keynote address at the sixth annual BRIC Summit, which will be held March 15 in downtown Los Angeles and online the next day.
Earlier this morning, Freeform announced that it will air the unscripted series, previously announced as a Hulu original, on its network before it hits the streaming platform. The show follows the five-time Emmy winner and Taketa, who were married from 1999 to 2008, as they co-parent their daughter and continue to work together on their banner A Wayne and Mandie Creative and alongside Taketa’s longtime partner, with whom she shares a son. Heng serves as executive producer and showrunner. The trio were chosen as speakers, according to BRIC Foundation, for their shared commitment to providing opportunities to BIPOC and LGBTQ+ people in the entertainment industry (Brady came out as pansexual last year).
The theme of this year’s BRIC Summit, a solutions-oriented think tank conference focused on DEI in the creative economy, is Perseverance. “From the historic labor strikes and the unregulated proliferation of AI to the decentralization of DEI, our industry is constricting,” BRIC Foundation executive director and co-founder Nicole Hendrix said in a statement. “Despite these unprecedented setbacks, we have to persevere in order to adapt, pivot and rebuild. We look forward to coming together to find solutions that can rebuild our industry and fortify creators against these challenges.”
The summit’s in-person day is invite-only for members of the industry and will revolve around four pillars: Break the cycle (stopping the cyclical rollback of progress), Reinvent the greenlight (focusing on creators), Impact the workforce (examining the impact of generative AI) and Change the course (collaborating with educational and government initiatives). Of note is a fireside conversation between Karen Horne and Jeanell English, whose departures from Warner Bros. Discovery and the film Academy, respectively, were part of the exodus of industry DEI executives last summer. The morning will kick off with an executive breakfast conversation hosted by former NBA All-Star and investor Baron Davis and made possible by partner ASIFA-Hollywood, and the day will conclude with a screening of short films from diverse emerging filmmakers in partnership with Silver Lake Shorts…