LESLIE IWERKS- Founder & Creative Director

Leslie Iwerks is an Academy Award® and Emmy® nominated director and producer who currently serves as the CEO and Creative Director of Iwerks & Co., a Santa Monica based multimedia production company.

Iwerks creates critically acclaimed and award-winning documentaries, features and series that celebrate the genius, risks and rewards of creative visionaries, showcase heartfelt human tales, from the depths of the Guatemalan garbage dumps to the toxic tar sands of Alberta, Canada, and that document the human story of innovation and enterprise globally. An adventure and travel enthusiast, Iwerks has filmed on all seven continents around the world. 

Her body of work encompasses feature films, such as The Pixar Story, Citizen Hearst, Industrial Light & Magic: Creating the Impossible, The Hand Behind the Mouse: The Ub Iwerks Story and League of Legends Origins, acclaimed environmental documentaries, including Recycled Life, Pipe Dreams and Downstream, and most recently, the in-depth docuseries, The Imagineering Story, which debuted on Disney+ in 2019.

Iwerks’ desire to innovate and push boundaries with her filmmaking has been cultivated and inspired by her family upbringing, as her grandfather, Ub Iwerks, was the original designer and co-creator of Mickey Mouse and a multi Academy Award®-winning visual effects pioneer, and her father, Don Iwerks, is also an Academy Award® winner for Technical Lifetime Achievement, and the founder of the large format film company, Iwerks Entertainment, which has built Iwerks large format theaters and projections systems in over 200 theaters around the world. 

MARK CATALENA- Co-Executive Producer and Director

Mark Catalena is a multiple Emmy® nominated producer, director and editor. For nearly two decades, Catalena has achieved excellence in the fields of non-fiction programming and documentary filmmaking of the highest journalistic integrity.

In 2009, he received a Peabody Award for the documentary feature Inventing LA: The Chandlers and Their Times. Additionally, Catalena received a 2012 Primetime Emmy® nomination for Outstanding Picture Editing for his work on Johnny Carson: King of Late Night, which became the highest-rated documentary in the 28-year history of the American Masters series on PBS. 

Catalena has collaborated with multiple filmmakers on over 25 films for the Emmy® Award-winning A&E series Biography, including six two-hour specials on such icons as Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, Charlie Chaplin and Brian Wilson, as well as the exclusive on the life and career of Georgia O’Keeffe, which marked his directorial debut. He co-directed Goldwyn for PBS and the Emmy® Award-winning Stardust: The Bette Davis Story for TCM.  

In 2016, Catalena joined Iwerks & Co. where he wrote and edited The Imagineering Story and Ella Brennan: Commanding the Table. From authoritative character studies to fly-on-the-wall observations, his emphasis on story and his constant endeavor for high production values has made him a consummate documentarian.