Natalie Wade

Natalie Wade is a senior director of member relations and awards administration for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, overseeing awards rules, eligibility, and Oscar submissions. She also oversees branch committees and membership initiatives for the Casting Directors, Cinematographers, Production and Technology, and Visual Effects branches and leads the Scientific and Technical Awards administration. Before joining the Academy in 2017, Wade worked in film production and management. A Dallas native, she earned a BFA in Creative Producing from Chapman University.

Meredith Shea

Meredith Shea is the first Chief Membership, Impact, and Industry Officer for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, appointed to the role in April 2023. In this position, she brings together the teams who lead the strategy and implementation for the Academy's new member cultivation and outreach, awards administration, rules and regulations, membership branch structural changes, member and industry engagement, film festival and international strategies, talent development programs, science & technology council, and industry DEAI and sustainability efforts.

Shea served as the Director of Industry Relations at ARRAY, the social impact collective dedicated to narrative change. There, she oversaw ARRAY Crew, the personnel database designed to connect underrepresented below-the-line crew members with producers, studio executives and department heads. Prior to that, she spent a decade at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as a Membership and Awards executive. At the Academy, she oversaw the Directors, Film Editors, Short Films & Feature Animation and Writers branches, including the administration of the rules, submissions and voting for the Animated Feature and International Feature Film Oscar categories.

She is a frequent participant on industry panels, including the Directors Guild of America, Producers Network Marché du Film at Festival de Cannes, Mifa at Annecy International Animation Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, and Flanders CONNeXT at Film Fest Gent. She has served on juries for numerous film festivals. Shea began her career at the Everett Collection in film preservation and archival management. She is a member of ASIFA-Hollywood, International Documentary Association (IDA), Women in Film and holds a Bachelor of Arts from St. John’s University, New York.

Janet Yang

An Emmy and Golden Globe Award-winning Hollywood producer, Yang is currently the President of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.

Yang has worked with some of the most formidable directors and actors in the world. She came to prominence through her collaboration with Steven Spielberg on Empire of the Sun (Warner Bros). That was followed by a long partnership with multiple Academy Award-winner Oliver Stone—where she served as Executive Producer on the iconic The Joy Luck Club (Disney), and as a Producer on the Golden Globe-winning The People vs. Larry Flynt (Columbia Pictures).

Her most recent credit is as an Executive Producer on the Oscar-nominated animated feature, Over the Moon. Based on her original story, the film was directed by legendary animator Glen Keane and released on Netflix in 2020. 

Among her many other credits are: the Sundance award-winning Dark Matter with Meryl Streep; The Weight of Water (Lionsgate) directed by Academy Award winner Kathryn Bigelow with Academy award winner Sean Penn; Fox’s High Crimes with Morgan Freeman; a Chinese adaptation of the acclaimed Disney franchise High School Musical; cult favorites Zero Effect, by Jake Kasdan, and Shanghai Calling with China Film Group.

Most recently, Yang was named one of the “100 Most Powerful Women in Hollywood” by the Hollywood Reporter. She was also honored by Variety's Power of Women 2023.

Yang began her career by running the first distribution company to market Chinese films into North America. She also brokered the reintroduction of American cinema to the Chinese marketplace on behalf of several studios after a decades-long hiatus.

Committed to fostering global understanding, Yang is a co-founder of Gold House, the non-profit collective of influential Asian cultural leaders; a long-standing member of the Committee of 100, an organization of the most prominent Chinese-Americans; and an advisory board member of Asia Society Southern California where she also chairs its highly regarded US-Asia Entertainment Summit. 

Yang has been featured in The New York Times, LA Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Bloomberg, Variety, South China Morning Post, Harper’s Bazaar, as well as on numerous television and radio shows across the US and Asia such as NPR,CCTV and Beijing TV. She is frequently asked to consult on projects and sought after for public speaking engagements.

Yang is the first Asian American to have a pillar dedicated to her inside the Renzo Piano- designed Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. 

Fluent in Mandarin Chinese, Yang holds a B.A. from Brown University in Chinese studies and an M.B.A. from Columbia University.She was appointed as a Presidential Fellow at Loyola Marymount University and recently awarded an Honorary Doctorate degree in Humane Letters from Bowdoin College.

For more information, please visit:www.janetyang.com