As VP, Kids and Family for Gaumont, Michelle, or “Sully” as she’s known, serves as head of development, with an eye for finding compelling new creators, characters kids want to play and emulate, and interesting stories to tell in both the kids and live-action spaces. Sully was key in shepherding Gaumont’s preschool series Do, Re & Mi starring Kristen Bell and Jackie Tohn to greenlight in her previous role as a Kids Development Executive for Amazon Prime Video. Her career North Star is to always work for someone she admires, on a team she can learn from and to make cool things that kids love. At Gaumont, the studio that produced Stillwater on Apple TV+ and Samurai Rabbit on Netflix, she’s getting to do all that and more.

Prior to that, she led National Geographic’s kids and family digital content initiatives, making mobile apps, Webby award-winning websites, e-books and NG Kids TV, its multi-platform, OTT video channel. Michelle was the director of editorial programming for AOL’s teen service, Red and built premium educational products like Study Buddy and Writing Wizard. In her pre-digital life, she was an editor at Teen and MoxieGirl magazines during the boy band/Britney heyday and was a freelance writer for publications like Marie Claire, Teen People, TeenStyle, YM and CosmoGirl. She also authored a self-empowering help book for tween girls, but you’d have to twist her arm for the backlisted title!

Her commitment to youth extends offline. She volunteers with Launch Leadership, a non-profit in her home state, Nebraska, that aims to develop leadership skills in middle and high school students. Sully is a Wilco super fan, Walking Dead devotee and hums her own sunshine-y tune like Do, Re & Mi's little blue bird Mi. She is a graduate of Pepperdine University.

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