Valerie Watts Meraz Joins Turner Broadcasting as Vice President of Program Acquisitions

Valerie Watts Meraz has joined Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. as vice president of program acquisitions for Turner Entertainment Networks (TEN) and the  Animation, Young Adults and Kids Media group (AYAKM). In this capacity, Meraz will negotiate deals for non-sports program acquisitions for TNT, TBS, Turner Classic Movies (TCM) and truTV, as well as for Cartoon Network, Adult Swim and Boomerang. She will also consult with individual networks on program planning in support of network strategy. Meraz is based in Atlanta and reports to Deborah Bradley, senior vice president of program acquisitions for Turner Broadcasting.

Meraz joins the company after serving as vice president of content acquisitions for Showtime Networks, Inc., where she oversaw the evaluation and acquisition of content for Showtime, The Movie Channel, and Flix, including for the on-demand and digital platforms. While at Showtime, Meraz negotiated deals for the acquisition of feature films, documentaries, short films, acquired series and stand-up comedy specials.

Prior to joining Showtime in 2000, Meraz worked in feature film development at Disney’s Buena Vista Motion Pictures Group. She began her career at 20th Century Fox in the exhibitor services group as a sales trainee and was soon promoted to a position in international theatrical promotions, where she helped develop media and retail promotions for such films as Titanic, The Full Monty and Romeo + Juliet.

A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, Meraz holds a bachelor’s degree in mass communications from the University of California, Los Angeles and master’s degree in motion picture producing from the Peter Stark Producing Program at the University of Southern California.

Turner Broadcasting System, Inc., a Time Warner company, creates and programs branded news; entertainment; animation and young adult; and sports media environments on television and other platforms for consumers around the world.