Commercial Directing

Bevan Mahaney is an award-winning Creative Director/Writer at Grey West. At Grey for almost three years, she recently moved from NYC to the LA office and has worked on a range of accounts, including Fitbit, Gillette, Downy, T.J.Maxx, and most recently, Google/YouTube. Over her career, Bevan’s worked with many leading industry brands: Yahoo, Verizon, Sprint, the NBA, Dr. Pepper, Snapple, Ciroc, Skyy Vodka, Chase, Capital One, American Express, and John Frieda at agencies including AKQA, Momentum, Tribal, Arnold, McGarryBowen, and DigitasLBI.

In addition to her advertising work, she started a long-form improv troupe at her alma mater, Washington University in St. Louis, where she studied Psychology, Philosophy, and Neuroscience. She interned at Late Night with Conan O’Brien, wrote freelance for Saturday Night Live, and performed improv comedy at Upright Citizen’s Brigade in NYC. In 2001, she started a hand-painted shoe company called ‘Bevans shoes’ and created pairs for fabulous females, including Anne Hathaway, Carolina Herrera, and Ricky Lauren. A lover of the outdoors, she’s spent a year backpacking around South America and Australia and is now very happy to be living by the ocean.

Rebecca Wray has nearly two decades worth of experience in the advertising and entertainment industries. She brings a passion for cultivating and evolving creative talent to her role as Executive Producer at Durable Goods. The Los Angeles native studied at USC before beginning her career at Paramount Pictures. She set her sights on “real” city life in Chicago, where she got her first taste of the commercial production world by managing production company sales at SourceEcreative. She quickly fell in love with the creativity and immediacy of the medium, moving back to Los Angeles, where she worked as a producer for a number of commercial production and post shops, eventually landing at Digital Kitchen, where she spent 3 years as a Producer. Following Digital Kitchen, she spent 7 years as the Executive Producer for atSwim and Milk and Honey Films, growing their international directorial roster and expanding her global production expertise with an 8-month stint in Prague.

Tamika Lamison is a Virginia native who graduated from The American University with a BA in Performing Arts & Theatre. While living in New York, she wrote her first screenplay, The Jar By the Door, which was a Sundance Finalist and won several awards, including the Gordon Parks Indie Film Award. She then attended the New York Film Academy to learn filmmaking and graduated having made her first short film. After expanding her filmmaking knowledge, she moved to Los Angeles. She won several fellowships and awards in writing and directing, including the ABC/Walt Disney Fellowship in Screenwriting for, Memoirs of Virgin Whore, Guy Hanks, and Marvin Miller Fellowship, the CBS Director’s Initiative and AFI’s Directing Workshop for Women Fellowship in which she wrote, directed and produced the multi-award winning short film, Hope. This film aired on every major network. She was hired as a camera operator and director of BET’s first reality TV show, College Hill.

Maya Washington is an award-winning writer/director/producer from Minneapolis, MN. 2018 marked the release of her latest films: the award-winning narrative short film CLEAR, about a woman reconnecting with her teen daughter after a wrongful conviction, and a sports documentary, Through the Banks of the Red Cedar, about her father, Gene Washington, who was a member of the first fully integrated college football team in America. Maya began her creative career as a dancer turned musical theatre actor in the Twin Cities vibrant theatre community as a child performer. While at USC, she studied acting, directing, film, and dramatic writing, which allowed her to explore her passion for storytelling in a variety of mediums. While pursuing her MFA, Maya worked full-time as a professional actor and choreographer. Her background on stage/camera and behind the scenes has given her the opportunity to work on everything from live theatre, commercials, and print ads to web series, films, and television. Maya is dedicated to projects that have a sense of “purpose” in the world, selecting stories that illuminate some aspect of the human experience that is untold, rarely seen, or might benefit from new approaches to issues of diversity and inclusion, primarily in America. Her award-winning narrative short White Space (starring ABC Family Switched at Birth’s Ryan Lane) about a deaf performance poet aired on network television and was nominated for a Black Reel Award.