Courtney Lauren Penn, Producer, Founder, Boundless Pictures

Courtney began her career in sell-side mergers and acquisitions and corporate restructuring on Wall Street. She worked for a boutique investment bank that specialized in advisory services, valuation, transaction structuring, strategic financial restructuring and private placements for privately-owned middle market companies, under $250MM in valuation, across a range of industries including biotechnology, entertainment, health care, financial services and tech. As a senior banker, her deal team closed 17 sell-side transactions, 3 buy-side and a number of recapitalizations. After becoming a Vice President, she left and founded Athena B Consulting, an strategic advisory services company for privately held and publicly traded companies, family / home offices, charitable foundations and high net worth individuals specializing in debt restructuring, risk mitigation, intellectual property collateralization and optimization, IP sales and licensing strategy and capital raising. Several clients had film portfolios and after restructuring, selling and licensing a portfolio of privately held distressed film assets, the Company began to focus more exclusively on entertainment, film finance and leveraging entertainment IP.

Courtney moved exclusively into film finance and production with the Founding of Boundless Pictures in 2008 as a film finance, development and production company. Boundless’s finance arm is supported by private equity and mitigates risk through its senior and gap-lending facility for securitized small-to-medium size films. Boundless’s production arm was launched when Courtney and her co-founding partner, Brandon Burrows, teamed up with Wesley Snipes for the Namibia-based shoot for their supernatural actioner Gallowwalkers (released, Lionsgate 2013). Subsequent Boundless Pictures’ productions include 2014 theatric release Dark Hearts, starring X-Men star Lucas Till (Nominated, Best Picture at Raindance), and their upcoming action-comedy FoolProof, thriller Cry Justice and a sequel to Gallowwalkers. Boundless continues to run its finance division separately from its production arm. The Company announced at AFM 2015, a subsidiary label, FireBrand, which finances and produces elevated genre Pictures under $10MM in budget. The slate’s inaugural film, The Perfect Weapon starring Steven Seagal was shot in October and will be released in August, 2016.

Courtney attended the University of Pennsylvania (undergraduate) and subsequently studied Filmmaking and Direction at NYU’s Tisch School for the Arts. She is a former National and International Chess Champion, Visiting Committee Member of Hematologic Oncology at the Dana Farber Institute, current Platinum Member of New York Women in Film & Television, Member of the Producers’ Guild of America and Committee Member for the film-focused, educational charity TRUESPARK.

Courtney and Brandon have attended at least one film finance forum a year for the past five years and are incredibly grateful to Amy Baker and Katherine Winston for the phenomenal programs they create and the support they continue to provide to the entertainment and filmmaking community. We are honored to join their West Coast program this year.