Women in Technology: Hollywood (WiTH), on May 22, during the Hollywood Innovation & Transformation Summit (HITS), introduced the most recent nominees to the WiTH Foundation Board of Directors and provided updates on the upcoming seventh WiTH Leadership Awards and SoCal Women’s Leadership Summit, a full-day event co-located, for the third time, with the Infinity Festival that is scheduled for Nov. 7 in Hollywood, California.
WiTH will be celebrating its 10th anniversary at the upcoming event.
Kicking off the session “The Road to SoCal Women’s Leadership Summit,” Nadya Ichinomiya, chair of the WiTH Foundation and VP, head of Agile Transformation, Enablement & Operations at Sony Pictures Entertainment, reflected back on 10 years ago, when WiTH first started at Sony Pictures and she “had a dilemma.”
She approached Guy Finley, MESA president, at the Spring HITS back then to ask if she could somehow address attendees at that event and ask if anybody wanted to join the Sony Pictures women’s tech group.
“I had barely ever gotten on stage,” she recalled. “My public speaking skills were zero” and she was nervous about public speaking but she realized this was her chance to let others in the industry know about WiTH, she said.
She was invited to get on the stage right after a break, when the room was full, to address attendees and took advantage of the chance she had been given, she recalled.
Ichinomiya flashed forward to the start of the Covid pandemic, a “moment where we could have shrunk again,” she noted. WiTH was running about four events each year at that point. Instead of shrinking, she recalled: “We grew and we did 20 events that year because we’re women in technology and diversity just makes us stronger.”
The upcoming event will be “like no other conference that you’ve ever experienced,” said Christina Aguilera, President, WiTH Foundation, and VP of Product, Enterprise Technology at Crunchyroll.
“From a board member perspective, we often [make] additions to our board [that] get announced at the SoCal Women’s Leadership Summit in the fall,” Aguilera pointed out. “We did make some changes recently,” she said, noting that Anna Sugai, manager of Agile Enablement at Sony Pictures, and Beate Chelette, CEO and growth architect at Chelette Enterprises and co-chair of programming at WiTH, had joined the board.
Artificial intelligence (AI) will be among the various topics discussed during the upcoming WiTH event.
“Our theme this year is ‘Together WiTH,” Nina Skorus-Neely, Secretary, WiTH Foundation and industry advisor at Microsoft, went on to tell HITS attendees.
HITS Spring was presented by Box, with sponsorship by Fortinet, SHIB, AMD, Brightspot, Grant Thornton, MicroStrategy, the Trusted Partner Network, the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA) and EIDR, and was produced by MESA in partnership with the Pepperdine Graziadio School of Business.