Jury Biography – Blanca Lista

Blanca Lista has over twenty years of experience in the entertainment industry overseeing feature film development, production, and post-production. Her top skills are finding and nurturing talent; breaking and developing stories for the screen; creating and packaging high quality teams of creatives; finding and partnering with financiers and studios; and managing budgets to lead successful productions. She is a highly creative producer and tastemaker and has the passion, determination, tenacity, and attention to detail that help bring her and her team’s creative visions into reality.

Blanca joined The Jim Henson Company in 2009 and served as a Production Executive on ‘Alexander the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day’ with Disney and ‘The Star’ with Sony Pictures Animation. She then won an Emmy® for Outstanding Children’s Program as Co-Executive Producer on ‘The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance’ for Netflix and is now Producing ‘The Portable Door’ starring Christoph Waltz and Sam Neill, and is Co-Producing Guillermo del Toro’s ‘Pinocchio’ with Netflix.

Prior to joining The Jim Henson Company in 2009, Blanca was a Creative Assistant at Warner Bros. Studios and Sony Pictures Entertainment. Blanca is a graduate of Bard College where she received her undergraduate degree in Film and Asian Studies and she earned her MFA with Honors Distinction from LUCA School of Arts in Belgium. During that time, Blanca was also awarded the prestigious artist-in-residency program at art laboratory, Bains Connective.

Blanca has built her career and has grown professionally at The Jim Henson Company while wearing many different hats as a producer and production executive. Her role is truly a one-stop shop of producing in every stage of the film making and storytelling process. A role which has led her to develop a wide and diverse network of creatives and executives that hold her in the highest of regards.

Her international upbringing and focus gave her native fluency in English, Spanish and French and proficiency in Mandarin Chinese which has lent her to seek international film making opportunities and partnerships from around the globe, working modularly in seeking the production models to best fit each individual project.