Holly Bario

Holly Bario runs the show as president of production at Amblin Partners, basically steering the ship for anything dropping under Amblin Entertainment or DreamWorks Pictures. She’s been in the game with them since 2008, back when they were still called DreamWorks Studios, jumping in as executive VP of production. Since then, she’s been the engine behind a whole lineup of hits—think The Help, The Girl on the Train, A Dog’s Purpose, and The House with a Clock in Its Walls (yeah, the one with Jack Black and Cate Blanchett hamming it up). Before she was bossing it at Amblin, she put in serious time at Universal Pictures, climbing from director of development all the way to exec VP of production. That's over a decade of wrangling big projects and making comedy gold happen. If you’ve laughed at Bruce Almighty, Meet the Parents, Meet the Fockers, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, or Knocked Up, she had her fingerprints all over those. And if you’ve ever heard a car engine roar in The Fast and the Furious (either the first one or its sequel), yep, she had a hand in making that a monster franchise too. She started at Universal back in ’96, working for producer Marc Platt—so she’s basically seen it all. Plus, she’s got that Emerson College cred. Hustle, humor, blockbusters—if you’ve watched a big studio comedy or action flick in the last 20 years, odds are Holly Bario was somewhere in the mix, making it happen.