Creative Artists Agency has elevated Risa Gertner and Sherrie Sage Schwartz to its management committee, the agency announced Monday.
Gertner, who joined CAA in 1996, has helped guide the agency’s motion picture literary business for nearly 20 years, serving as the practice’s co-head alongside Todd Feldman. She personally represents filmmakers including Ron Howard, Simon Kinberg, Seth MacFarlane, Alex Kurtzman, Susannah Grant, Tony Gilroy, and J.C. Chandor, among others.
Schwartz is agency’s Global Chief Human Resources Officer. Before joining the agency in February 2015, she was the Senior Vice President of Human Resources for Activision Publishing, a division of Activision Blizzard. She has worked in other executive HR roles at Levi Strauss & Co., Parke-Davis/Warner-Lambert Company, and Kraft Foods.
“I am proud to have held a leadership role at CAA for nearly 20 years, and to work with so many talented and smart colleagues in our department and around the agency,” Gertner said in a statement. “Our company leaders have demonstrated exceptional stewardship and I am excited to play an even larger role in ensuring that CAA remains the best in the business.”
“I’ve been fortunate in my role to work with a superb management team who lead the agency with vision, purpose, and dignity,” Schwartz said in a statement. “They have been clear about, and enormously supportive of, the HR’s team’s efforts to make sure CAA is always the best place one could choose to work, at all experience levels and from any background. We believe a diverse environment of intelligent, energized, thoughtful and empowered employees brings out the best in everyone and creates the finest possible service for our clients.”
“We are thrilled to welcome Sherrie and Risa to the management team, and are enormously excited about their important contributions in this new role,” CAA President Richard Lovett said in a statement. “Risa is not only a fantastically talented agent, but a proven and respected business leader with an acute understanding of our company, our clients and the marketplace. Sherrie has been an outstanding leader of our people efforts companywide, building a first-class global human resources infrastructure and initiating successful strategic initiatives to improve hiring, training, development, benefits, and ways of working. Risa and Sherrie are extraordinary executives whose voices at the company leadership level will have lasting impact.”
Also on Monday, CAA also unveiled a pair of operational groups, Finance and People & Culture, comprised of 35 women and men, including many existing department heads and next-generation leaders, who reporting directly to the Management Committee.
“We have industry thought leaders and executives across all divisions and around the world,” Lovett said. “As our company continues its rapid and successful growth, the new operating groups provide a more structured approach to capitalizing on this unique business advantage, to create greater opportunity for our company and clients. With a rich diversity of voices represented by senior and emerging leaders from a wide variety of professional and personal backgrounds, we will be that much stronger on all operational fronts.”