2011 Annual Awards Contest

Alexander Payne earned his MFA in Film at UCLA and now makes comedies. He debuted with Citizen Ruth in 1996, which starred Swoosie Kurtz and Laura Dern, and followed it with Election in 1999, starring Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon, which won Best Screenplay awards from the Writers' Guild of America and the New York Film Critics Circle, as well as an Oscar® nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. About Schmidt, starring Jack Nicholson and Kathy Bates, premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 2002 and opened the New York Film Festival. Sideways, which starred Paul Giamatti, Thomas Haden Church, Virginia Madsen, and Sandra Oh, won an Oscar in 2004 for Best Adapted Screenplay and was nominated for four others, including Best Picture and Best Director. Payne’s latest film, The Descendants, starring George Clooney, is a contemporary Hawaii story based on a novel by Kaui Hemmings.

Trevor Groth, director of programming for the Sundance Film Festival, oversees the film and jury selection process for the festival, supervises the programming staff and works with the director of the festival on strategic planning.

Groth’s first job in film was as a development assistant for the Sundance Institute in 1992. He joined the programming staff a year later where he has worked ever since. During that time, along with programming the Sundance Film Festival, he has been a consultant for numerous international festivals and film organizations including Artisan Entertainment, Australian Film Institute, IFILM, and the Off-Plus Camera Film Festival in Krakow. From 2001 to 2009, he served as artistic director for the CineVegas Film Festival. In 2009, he was one of ten festival directors asked to contribute to the Phaidon Press publication Take 100: The Future of Film: 100 New Directors.

Groth graduated from the University of Utah with a BA in Telecommunications and Film.

Courtenay Valenti was born in Houston, Texas and raised in Washington, D.C. She graduated cum laude from Tufts University in 1985 with a double major in English and Economics.

From 1985 to 1988, she worked at the New York City investment banking firm Lehman Brothers in mortgage finance as a mortgage finance analyst and later traded mortgage securities. In 1988, she moved to Los Angeles to work as an assistant to director and Academy Award®-winning producer Tony Bill.

In 1989, she joined Warner Bros. Pictures. She currently is an Executive Vice President of Production. During her tenure at the studio, she has supervised a wide variety of films: A Little Princess, Contact, Selena, You’ve Got Mail, Message in a Bottle, L.A. Confidential, The Iron Giant, The Polar Express, Nights in Rodanthe, the Academy Award-winning film Happy Feet, Legend of the Guardians, as well as Harry Potter 5 and 6.

Most recently, she supervised The Lucky One based on the best-selling novel by Nicholas Sparks and starring Zac Efron, Crazy, Stupid, Love. starring Steve Carrell and Ryan Gosling, the final installment of the Harry Potter franchise, and the sequel to Happy Feet.

Courtenay lives in Los Angeles with her husband Patrick Roberts and their two children Wiley and Lola Lorraine. She serves on the Alumni Board of Tufts University’s Communications and Media Studies Program as well as the Pacific Oaks Preservation Organization which is affiliated with the Pacific Oaks College and Children’s School.

Lawrence Bender, producer and political activist, has a career that spans two decades of producing highly successful films with a cumulative worldwide box office of over one billion dollars. His films to date, including such hits as Inglourious Basterds, Pulp Fiction, and Good Will Hunting, have been honored with 29 Academy Award® nominations, including three for Best Picture, and have won six. His film An Inconvenient Truth, which raised unprecedented awareness about climate change, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. His latest documentary, Countdown To Zero, details the urgent risk posed by proliferation, terrorism, and accidental use of nuclear weapons. Other films include From Dusk Till Dawn, Anna and the King, The Mexican, Innocent Voices, and Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, Jackie Brown, and Kill Bill: Vol. 1 and Vol. 2. Lawrence has also produced Havana Nights: Dirty Dancing 2; Knockaround Guys; A Price Above Rubies; White Man’s Burden; Killing Zoe; and Fresh. Upcoming work includes Safe, which stars Jason Statham and will be released worldwide in 2012.

Bender is also a passionate social and political activist and supports many causes. Bender is on the Advisory Board to the Dean at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government and serves on the board of The Creative Coalition. He is a member of Council on Foreign Relations’ the Pacific Council. He is a recipient of the Torch of Liberty Award from the ACLU and spends much of his time holding fundraisers for political and social causes in his home city, Los Angeles.

Akiva Goldsman is an Oscar®-winning screenwriter, as well as a successful producer and director.

With his production company, Weed Road Pictures, Goldsman produced two mega-hit Will Smith starrers: Peter Berg’s Hancock, which earned approx. $625 million worldwide, and Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend, for which Goldsman also co-wrote the screenplay and which took in more than $585 million globally.

His additional producing credits with Weed Road include the smash hit actioner Mr. & Mrs. Smith, starring Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt and directed by Doug Liman, Francis Lawrence’s thriller Constantine, and Todd Phillips’ action/comedy Starsky & Hutch.

Goldsman won an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, and a Writers Guild of America Award for his screenplay for A Beautiful Mind, directed by Ron Howard, produced by Brian Grazer and starring Russell Crowe. The film won numerous honors, including the Oscar for Best Picture. Goldsman reunited with Howard, Grazer and Crowe as the screenwriter on the biopic Cinderella Man, for which Goldsman earned BAFTA Award and WGA Award nominations. He has since re-teamed with Howard and Grazer as the screenwriter on the worldwide blockbusters The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons, both starring Tom Hanks and based on the best-selling novels by Dan Brown.

Most recently, Goldsman is producing a Western drama about the life of Doc Holliday. He serves as a consulting producer on Fringe, writing, co-writing and directing episodes. Goldsman is also an executive producer on the Paranormal Activity franchise. His Weed Road banner, which has a first-look deal at Warner Bros., has a number of films in development.