New Hires & Promotions at Illumination Entertainment

Chris Meledandri’s Illumination Entertainment is continuing to ramp up its infrastructure by bringing two crucial hires onto its leadership team. The four-year-old company made several additions earlier this year, and now, Meledandri has announced the hirings of Brooke Breton as a senior production executive and Kit Giordano as Director of Development. Simultaneously, Kristin Wong-Ward has been promoted into the creative executive role.

Breton is currently producing the Despicable Me theme park attraction for Illumination, which is slated to open in 2012 at Universal Studios Orlando, and also has a long history as a producer of prominent live-action and animated motion pictures. She spent several years at Lightstorm Entertainment, where she served as co-producer on James Cameron’s Avatar, among other projects. Prior to that Breton co-produced Sky Captain And The World of Tomorrow for Paramount Pictures, and was also involved in the establishment of DreamWorks Animation where she produced The Road to El Dorado. She also associate produced three Star Trek feature films and spent several years as Senior Vice President of Digital Domain, where she oversaw projects that included True Lies, Interview With The Vampire, Apollo 13, and other major event movies.

Giordano most recently served as Vice President of Ben Stiller’s Red Hour Films (Tropic Thunder, Zoolander), and is an associate producer on the action comedy, 30 Minutes Or Less, starring Jesse Eisenberg and directed by Ruben Fleischer. She previously served as a book and theater scout for Miramax in New York and a development executive at Gunn Films.

After a stint as Meledandri’s executive assistant, Ward is moving into a new creative executive slot. There, her focus will cross all Illumination activities from feature film development through marketing.

Meledandri commented, “Brooke, Kit and Kristin are superb executives who are a great complement to our current team.”