Dawn Krantz

Dawn Krantz has an extremely broad range of experience in the entertainment, real estate and financial arenas and is a self proclaimed serial entrepreneur. Born in New York, raised in California, Krantz comes from a Hollywood family whose lineage overflows with talented, creative people including the founder of Paramount Pictures, Adolph Zukor, and cousins screenwriter, Stewart Stern, ("Rebel without a Cause", "The Ugly American") legendary musical Director, George Sidney ("Anchors Away, Bye Bye Birdie", Tony award winner, Sheila Bond ("Wish you were Here"), big band musicians, and many other artists and theater performers, on both her mother and father's side of the family. At the family gatherings there was always story telling and playing music and Dawn learned to love great story telling at an early age. In 1983, Krantz saw the rising trend of the video business and opened a video store chain in Austin, Texas. These stores ultimately became one of the most successful independent video store chains in the country. In addition, Dawn also opened a chain of full entertainment stores in factory outlet malls throughout the country. Krantz was voted in as a board member of the very prestigious Video Software Dealers Association (VSDA) from 1988-1995, eventually becoming Chairman of the Board, the only woman to ever hold this position. VSDA represented the major Hollywood studios and most independent studios as well as 35,000 video retailers around the world. During her time as Chairman, she helped produce the most successful entertainment convention in the world; started an extremely successful charity, Fast Forward to End Hunger with Jeff Bridges; and worked hand in hand with the MPAA lobbying in Washington for both the film and video game industry and helping define the video industry during its hay day. After selling her business, Dawn consulted with several very successful high tech, real estate and entertainment companies. She was then diagnosed with cancer and had to put everything on hold. When she got back on her feet she became a Realtor and in her third year, she sold 138 houses in one year, making her the # 1 agent in closed transactions in the US. In 2008, Dawn was approached to help finance a movie and in less then a month she raised $3,000,000 and green-lit the movie. With the real estate market crashing, she was back in show business. In 2010, Dawn moved back to California to produce films full time. Since then she has been building a very successful production company with more than 12 films in the slate with budgets from $3,000,000 - $100,000,000. Her last completed project was Man Down with Shia LaBeouf and Gary Oldman which was released by Lionsgate in 2016. Dawn has also been on the Board of South by Southwest Film Festival (SXSW) The Texas Angel Investors and The Capital Network. She was awarded Austin Business Woman of the Year, Nominated by Inc. Magazine for the prestigious award of Entrepreneur of the Year, was Video Retailer of the Year from the American Video Association and awarded one of the Top Video Store chains in the US multiple years.