Tisch West: Tisch West Pitching 101 with American Entertainment Investors

Tisch alum and Vice President of Development at American Entertainment Investors, Andra Gordon, along with AEI Producer, Sarena Khan, will lead a crash course on better pitching practices for film financing and development. Come with questions for an extensive Q&A session afterward.

Andra Gordon

Andra Gordon is a producer/writer, currently the Head of Development and Production at American Entertainment Investors, an entertainment finance firm. Financier and advisor to several major production companies, AEI has been involved in such films as The Hurt Locker, The Blind Side, Tree of Life, 12 Years A Slave, Prisoners, Sicario, The Man Who Knew Infinity, La La Land and Hotel Mumbai, among several others. Overseeing creative and business development for the company, Gordon develops and produces projects internally and sources investment opportunities.

She has a Master’s in Cinema Studies from NYU Tisch School of the Arts, where she received a full scholarship and Assistantship and currently sits on the NYU Tisch West council. She attended Northwestern University and CU-Boulder for undergrad, graduating summa cum laude with a BA in English and was the recipient of the Eaton Award, awarded to the top student in the Department of English. She is originally from Denver, Colorado.

Sarena Khan

An Indian-American independent producer and writer, Khan has forged her own path in the entertainment field. Born into a prominent filmmaking family from India, she grew up on Bollywood film sets, learning the craft from a different perspective at a very young age. Khan has a strong focus on crossing cultures through film and television. Within just a year of shooting her first film, she created, wrote and developed the India-US crossover television series, Khan Artist, set to shoot in both countries and multiple languages. She sold the series to Wiip (CAA backed TV studio run by Paul Lee) and partnered with premier Indian film director Anurag Kashyap (winner of 6 Filmfare Awards, India’s equivalent of the Oscars). Additionally, on the TV side, after a highly competitive situation, Khan acquired the rights to two of the biggest operatives in wildlife crime and traveled with them on an undercover research tip to South Africa. She then sold the international crime anthology series, The Last Savage, to Wiip.