User:SMcCandlish/Incubator/Adryenn Ashley

Adryenn Ashley is a writer, film producer, film director, and former actor, as well as a media-company entrepreneur and consultant. She was born in San Francisco, California. She is the award-winning author of Every Single Girl's Guide to Her Future Husband's Last Divorce. She founded ChickLit Media Group (2006), a self-improvement book publisher, and Crowded Reality (2014), a crowdfunding website for TV projects. She produced the TV shows Wake Up! (2015) and Plus Life (2015), among others.

Early life
Ashley earned a BA in psychology from Dominican University of California, then went to the Academy of Art College for film school, finishing up at Sonoma State University where she received an MA in film production and finance. She later received a PhD in constitutional law, and joined the California Alliance for Families and Children.

After getting married, when she was eight months pregnant her husband got a bill in the mail for $100,000 in back child support, stemming from his previous marriage. The ensuing court battle inspired Ashley to become a divorce financial analyst, forensic accountant, asset protection specialist, and constitutional law scholar, aside from her entertainment-industry work.

Acting career
Ashley's debut film as an actress was Money Trail which was released in 1995, followed by Road Stories and Incongruities. She also had a part in the 1997 film Flubber, but the scenes in which she appeared were deleted. .

Her acting career largely ended with an injury on the set of I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), though she later played roles in some of her own produced films, including Fly on the Wall (2005) and Making Metamorphoses (2001).

Production career
After her injury, Ashley transitioned from acting to primarily to work as a producer, director, and writer.

Her first produced feature film, Metal (1999, directed by Christopher E. Brown), won several awards during its two-year world tour of the film festival circuit, including the Jury Prize at the Pan-African Film Festival in 2000, and Best Picture at the Seattle Underground Film Festival.

In 2005, Ashley directed Anarchy Ahead: The Harvesting of American Families, a documentary film about the challenges of raising an emotionally well-balanced child in today's high-conflict-divorce society.

In television, she created The Real Deal in 2014, a reality show about independent filmmaking. Ashley and Chrystal Bougon executive-produced the 2015 reality show Plus Life: Unapologetically Fat & Fabulous, centered on Bougon's Curvy Girl Lingerie boutique. Ashley was also the executive producer of the 2015 reality show The Sifu: Kung Fu Redemption.

Ashley started the production house 21st Century Pictures Group, to produce films and TV shows.

Other work
Ashley started (in 2006) and writes for ChickLit Media Group, a publishing company which publishes self-improvement books. She founded Wow! Is Me, a startup-advisory, media-relations, and marketing-and-publicity service for medium and large businesses.

Ashley was a speaker at the User-Generated Content Expo (UGCX) in 2009 in San Jose, California, and in 2014 delivered a keynote speech on social television at the National Association of Broadcasters conference. .

Ashley founded Crowded Reality, a crowdfunding website for content creators to fund their reality and talk shows projects for television and streaming, and which incorporates advertising, sponsorship, and distribution. The first project funded on the platform, in 2015, was The Sifu: Kung Fu Redemption, which met its goal in 8 days.

Outside her entertainment-industry work, Ashley won the 2008 Bronze Medal in the Independent Publisher Book Awards for Every Single Girl's Guide to Her Future Husband's Last Divorce, and has written numerous divorce-related articles, speaks at seminars and to regional groups addressing the financial elements of divorce, and teaches continuing legal education classes on related subjects. She is certified in negotiation and conflict management. She is a member of the Institute for Divorce Financial Analysts, the International Association of Divorce Financial Planners, the Financial Divorce Association, and the American Bar Association's Family Law section. Ashley is on the board of birectors of Safeguard Guarantee Corporation, which claims to be first insurance underwriter to offer marriage assurance (i.e., an insurance policy against divorce).

Yelp controversy
The reviews website Yelp banned members of primarily three networking groups from its website in 2008, claiming they were engaged in a "you review me, I review you" arrangement, which violates Yelp's terms of service. Ashley's was among the profiles was deleted by Yelp. She launched the criticism websites Yelp-Sucks.com and YelpLawsuit.com as gathering places for angry business owners and to facilitate legal action against Yelp.

Production filmography
Ashley's major television/streaming and film production projects include: