Beverly Kopf: Trust Your Instincts & The Creative Process

Beverly joins us to outline her success and challenges as a writer and producer. She managed to overcome heavy obstacles and face her fears to claim awards and recognition, and even snagged an Emmy Award. Family death, rediscovering God, and coming out of the closet personally, and professionally. Mind you, this was about a millennia before LGBTQ movements began to shake foundations. Please join us and Beverly Kopf for some good ol' fashioned wisdom on this episode of What's Your Why! Beverly Kopf has a unique background of collaborating with A-list celebrities, developing hit shows, and working successfully within a wide range of formats – everything from reality to magazine to talk to long-form documentary. Kopf received an EMMY Award and a GLAAD Media Award for writing the hit ABC talk show The View. As creator of ‘Hot Topics,’ she helped develop the smart, off-the-cuff conversation that has made the show so successful. Prior to The View, Kopf enjoyed a successful career in Hollywood as a Segment Producer and Talent Executive where she conceived, booked, wrote, and produced hundreds of celebrity and issue-oriented segments for Good Morning America, CBS Morning News and Entertainment Tonight. She was one of a small team that created the award-winning series First Person with Maria Shriver. Since forming their production company, TVGals Media in 2000, Kopf and partner, Bobbie Birleffi, have produced, directed and written critically acclaimed and highly rated documentary programming, biographies and specials for television, film and digital outlets. They have also collaborated on several projects with Tony Award-winning director Julie Taymor. In 2011, their highly acclaimed feature documentary Wish Me Away won numerous Grand Jury prizes in Film Festivals around the world, including the Los Angeles Film Festival, and aired on SHOWTIME, NETFLIX, HULU, iTunes, and was nominated for an Emmy Award. In 2013, Birleffi and Kopf produced, directed and wrote, Spotlight on Broadway, (www.spotlightonbroadway.com), a series of 40 short video portraits of each of the Broadway Theaters for the New York City Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment. Hailed as a landmark series, it is still widely distributed within the Broadway community and beyond.