Jolene Rodriguez
The Award-winning Latina Executive Shares How she balanced being a mother, Intern, and Undergrad to ultimately succeed
Jolene Rodriguez is the President at Broken English Productions, the newly launched film finance arm of Grandave Capital. They launched last June with a focus on movie and TV projects centered on LatinX stories, told by Latinx filmmakers.
Previous to this new role, she was a development and production executive at Sony’s Screen Gems for over a decade.
During her tenure, Jolene leveraged her position to build an impressive list of industry contacts, A-list talent, producers, and film financiers. She played a critical role in setting up an Untitled Gabrielle Union rom-com and an Untitled Gigi Guerrero Latinx horror.
Jolene recently Executive Produced the 2019 high-profile Cannes Marché feature, The Absence of Eden, starring Zoe Saldana.
In addition, she is on the Advisory Board of the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival (LALIFF).
She was recognized as one of the Powerful and Influential Latinos in Entertainment of 2019 by the Imagen Foundation. The non-profit encourages the positive portrayals of Latinos in all forms of the entertainment media and rewards the excellence of those entities or individuals whose productions elevate the image and status of all Latinos.
Jolene’s origin story is inspiring as well. She held down a full-time college class load, part-time job, part-time internship, while also parenting her two babies, one of whom was two weeks old at the start of her internship at Sony.
If that doesn’t say BOSS, I don’t know what does…
This week, we chat about how to stop making excuses for your dreams, how to navigate the high highs and low lows, and Jolene’s wish for LatinX stories in the next decade.
Tune in!
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“You really have to take it into your own hands. You can’t sit and wait to be promoted. You can’t wait for things to be handed to you because it’s just not that way.”
- Jolene Rodriguez
Episode Transcript
