Susan Cartsonis

The Hollywood Reporter named Susan Cartsonis one of the top five grossing producers of the year for What Women Want—the highest grossing romantic comedy of all time at the time of its release and number two to this day—and Where the Heart Is starring Natalie Portman. Cartsonis has grossed over 1 billion in revenues as a producer and executive by creating movies focused on inclusion and the female audience.  All of her recent films have been awarded the ReFrame Stamp for inclusion. She has helped launch female directors’ careers as well as nurturing new writing talent, and focuses on this work through her company, Resonate Entertainment, founded in 2016 with producing partner Suzanne Farwell (The Holiday, The Intern, It’s Complicated).  Carrie Pilby, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, 2016, starring Bel Powley, Nathan Lane and Gabriel Byrne, was produced with Farwell and launched the start of their company.

Cartsonis’s recent Amazon hit, Sitting in Bars With Cake, starred Bette Midler and Marty Supreme’s Odessa A’Zion and Yara Shahidi.  Starring Anna Paquin and Cliff Curtis, her Australian sailing/action film True Spirit, sat in the top 1.4% of all movies watched on Netflix the first year of its release, and her dance musical hit Feel the Beat launched Sofia Carson’s Netflix career after Cartsonis met her producing Disney’s popular third Descendants movie, 2019.  Also with Disney, Cartsonis produced Freaky Friday the Musical, written by Pulitzer Prize winning duo Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey (Next to Normal).  Deidra & Laney Rob a Train, one of the first Netflix Original movies was the second feature of Native director Sydney Freeland and launched at Sundance 2017 to critical acclaim.  In 2016, The DUFF, which Cartsonis produced was dubbed “an instant teen classic” by Variety and cited as one of the most financially successful films of the year, budget to box office, comparing favorably to films such as The Fast and the Furious.  Also in the Young Adult realm, Cartsonis produced Middle School (2016), Invisible Sister (2015), and Beastly (2011). No Reservations starring Catherine Zeta-Jones and Aaron Eckhart (2008) was born after Cartsonis saw the original German film and brought it to financiers, and Aquamarine (2006), became a favorite “girl power and female friendship story” for a generation of young women.  In 1996 she launched her producing career with the love story  Firelight starring Sophie Marceau and Stephen Dillane, directed and written by Bill Nicholson (Gladiator).

Prior to producing, Cartsonis was a studio executive at 20th Century Fox for nearly a decade, where she rose from script reader to Senior VP of Production, developing and supervising over twenty films including Academy Award and Golden Globe-nominated Nell, French Kiss, and For the Boys, as well as popular hits like The Truth About Cats and Dogs, Dying Young, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which spawned several different television series. At Fox Cartsonis supervised talent deals such as The Farrelly Brothers, Geena Davis, Richard Gere, and Johnny Depp.

Cartsonis is a member of the Motion Picture Academy, the Television Academy, and Producer’s United.  She has taught and guest lectured internationally at many universities and film schools including UCLA, AFI, SCAD, NYU in both New York City and Singapore, USC, Multimedia University in Johor, Malaysia, Second City in Chicago, and Wilkes University.  She graduated from UCLA with a BA in Theater Arts and received her MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU.  Cartsonis serves as a mentor and advisor for The Writer’s Lab, founded by Meryl Streep and co-funded by Nicole Kidman and Oprah Winfrey, and as a mentor for the non-profit Cinestory, which supports emerging screenwriters.