In Marie Claire’s monthly series Role Models, we ask women we admire to share the details of their careers, from the pivots and setbacks to the life lessons that shaped their path.
Alana Mayo knows better than anyone that championing diverse, genre-defying filmmaking can be an uphill battle. Six years ago, when Mayo was named president of Orion Pictures, at a time when many American industries were making promises of inclusion that they ultimately wouldn’t keep, she saw it as her purpose. Two Oscar wins and several acclaimed films later—from Women Talking and Bottoms to Is God Is and Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother—the 42-year-old is seeing the fruits of her labor.
Mayo, a lifelong cinephile, came of age when Orion was known as a Hollywood heavyweight, making blockbusters that ranged from awards powerhouses to box-office phenomena. She grew up surrounded by entertainment as both a fan and an insider, voraciously consuming movies with her brothers while watching her parents work as radio and legal nonprofit executives. “I was watching my dad [Barry Mayo] found and sell a company by the time I was a teenager,” she says. “My first internships were at the age of 10 for my mother.” Her family instilled in her a work ethic and the importance of supporting Black culture and creating business opportunities for Black people. “It was early preparation for what, ultimately, we’re trying to do with Orion.”
Sitting in a meeting room at Orion’s NYC headquarters, Mayo speaks about her decades of industry experience with earnest reverence: She ascended from interning with Lee Daniels and Warrington Hudlin to climbing the ranks at Paramount to becoming the head of production and development at Michael B. Jordan’s Outlier Society. Mayo took over Orion, then a subset of MGM, at a time of great transition; 18 months after she joined, Amazon acquired the mid-sized studio. Still, she made the bold move to steer a directive that hit close to home: Continue to support original projects and first-time filmmakers, with an emphasis on bringing underrepresented audiences stories that reflect their culture.
Mayo has already made good on her word. At the 2023 Academy Awards, Sarah Polley’s Women Talking became Orion’s first Best Picture nominee since The Silence of the Lambs in 1992, and Polley took home the award for Best Adapted Screenplay. The studio has continued to release awards frontrunners, like American Fiction, which garnered five Oscar nominations and saw writer-director Cord Jefferson win Best Adapted Screenplay. Mayo is not just an awards whisperer but also a talent incubator: The female filmmakers who’ve worked with Orion, from Chinonye Chukwu to Rachel Sennott to Tessa Thompson, have only continued to flourish.
None of this has been easy. In early 2020, chief-level positions at mainstream studios skewed 91 percent white and 82 percent male, while senior executives were 93 percent white and 80 percent male. Despite the boom in diversity hiring later that year, several Black female industry veterans have since left their roles. This is despite a decade of studies— and the success of movies like Sinners and KPop Demon Hunters—showing that films that reflect the diversity of moviegoers perform better at the box office. In this fraught landscape, Mayo stands out in a cohort of visionaries who are ensuring that inclusion isn’t just a buzzword but a successful policy.
It’s very important to me that people know that we are...trying to meet an unmet appetite for more types of storytelling coming out of Hollywood.
Alana Mayo
On falling in love with storytelling
I was consuming a lot of things at the height of the home-media era. My dad had a huge LaserDisc collection of movies like All About Eve and Apocalypse Now but also new movies. My brothers and I are of that generation where we would watch movies for fun. But I loved reading books more than anything. I would read in the shower, on road trips. Story was the thing that was both entertainment and escape. That was the way I engaged with the world that felt safe and exciting.
On the women who inspired her career path
I was working for Lee Daniels [in college], and he had two brilliant women working for him at the time, Lisa Cortés and Doreen Oliver. One of them ran production, and the other one ran development. You’re supposed to connect to really good material, connect filmmakers with material, and have a point of view on what should get made and why, and then produce it. Those women were just so amazing at all of those things. It was truly a stroke of luck that I had that internship, because I could then leave college and say, “I want to be a production and development executive.” This language that would’ve taken me years to find, had I not worked for that company for a summer.
On the most fulfilling part of her job
That first conversation with a filmmaker who is interested in us being the studio on their film is all speculation. It’s all dreaming and imagining what a movie could be, months, if not years, down the line. That journey of collaborating with filmmakers across the life cycle of a film is incredibly fulfilling. A lot of my job is business stuff, which I love—but ultimately, my job is to be a part of making movies that people hopefully see to a large extent and love. It’s unbelievable to see something tangible exist, where now other people are watching and texting and saying, “We love that scene,” knowing that it all started from a conversation or a read of a script or hearing a pitch.
On her commitment to telling underrepresented stories
Executives are not supposed to be the story; it’s the movies and the people that make the movies. The reason why I’m a little bit more outward facing is that I and all of the people that work at Orion are trying to create a space for something that doesn’t really exist. It’s very important to me, not so much that people attach my face to that but that I am somebody who is loudly and proudly talking about this thing that we are trying to build. We’ve got to [connect] audiences who want to see films that are more representative of them to filmmakers who are interested in their story, their identity, their culture, their background. I want them to connect these movies to a larger effort that’s not just me. It’s very important to me that people know that we are thinking about these movies in a super-intentional way of trying to meet an unmet appetite for more types of storytelling coming out of Hollywood.
On Oscars recognition
Looking for any sign of external validation can always put you in a trap, but striving for making movies that will be excellent creatively and commercially is a much easier goal to meet. I don’t think anything is perfectly fair or a meritocracy, but it was really rewarding to know that these movies that we made, because we thought that the scripts were excellent and the filmmakers were excellent, that they were validated in that way by the Oscars voting body too. I am a book nerd, so the more exciting thing for me was to be nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay three times and to win it twice [for Women Talking and American Fiction]. I felt very proud of that because we love writers here, and those movies all started with literary material that blew you away, adapted into scripts that blew you away on the page. So that was, for me, selfishly, a real boon, a lot of wind in my sails.
On her personal role model
My mom is as smart of a person as I’ve ever met in my life. She’s equal parts good and kind and lives the values that she preaches.
On how she hopes to impact Hollywood’s legacy
That we scaled Orion in a way where two things happen: One, the filmmakers we’ve worked with are consistently creating work in the world, in part because that first film was made possible by Orion; and two, we shine a light on a business model that every other studio could and should be doing, which is investing in original films by great filmmakers that feature people of color, queer folks, and women.
This piece originally appeared in Marie Claire's 2026 Legends issue.