ABOUT
John Gaeta met Kiri Hart during the core development of Star Wars for Lucasfilm and Disney where both collaborated on new development for entertainment approaches as well co-founded Lucasfilm’s ILMxLAB to explore advanced real time entertainment. Today, they are collaborating once more on modernizing the landmark story-world Metropolis, created by legendary creator Osamu Tezuka.
Kiri Hart
John Gaeta
Kiri Hart is the lead producer and founder of Counterculture Ltd, an independent media company focused on the incubation of original, cross-platform properties.
Prior to founding Counterculture, Hart was an Executive Producer on Pixar’s Academy Award winning animated film SOUL (Pete Docter), and Pixar’s Academy Award nominated LUCA (Enrico Casarosa). She also oversaw development and was a producer on the original science fiction film THE CREATOR (Gareth Edwards).
Before that, Hart was Senior Vice President of Development at Lucasfilm for six years. She founded the Lucasfilm Story Group, and oversaw the creative development and content strategy for STAR WARS across film, animated television, publishing, gaming, immersive media, and theme parks.
While at Lucasfilm, Hart co-produced THE LAST JEDI (Rian Johnson) and ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY (Gareth Edwards). She also produced the beloved and award-winning animated television series STAR WARS REBELS (Dave Filoni).
Along with her collaborator John Gaeta, Hart was one of the co-founders of Industrial Light and Magic’s immersive media studio, ILMxLAB, and oversaw story development on VADER IMMORTAL (David S. Goyer), a virtual reality series for Oculus.
John Gaeta is a prolific Creator / Designer / Inventor who is best known for his Academy Award winning work on the original The Matrix Trilogy. In collaboration with highest caliber originators of film, game, immersive and ai entertainment, he has a history of conceiving and developing new forms of content and experiences that have helped catalyze a variety of emergent entertainment formats.
John has held many roles as a Creative Executive developing strategy, core concept, world building, narrative premise and advanced user experience for film, game, theme parks, xr and multi-platform franchises. He has done this in collaboration with world class writers, conceptual artists, designers, directors, founders, leaders, teams and talent of all stripes.
After a notable period in Cinema where he was the principle visual effects designer for the Wachowski directing team, John has had roles as an Executive Creative Director, Executive Creative Producer, SVP Creative Strategy and CCO at companies such as Lucasfilm, Magic Leap, Epic Games and Inworld AI where he currently spends time pioneering state of the art AI Characters for game and virtual worlds with ex Google Deepmind veterans.
About Counterculture
Driven by a love of storytellers and the worlds they create, Counterculture curates and develops new ideas with a diverse group of creatives, while also shepherding upcoming films at the Walt Disney Studios, the Obamas’ Higher Ground Productions, and Rian Johnson’s T-Street. In addition, Counterculture consults on story and content strategy at Annapurna Pictures, Epic Games, and Pixar Animation Studios.