Built on experience. Driven by talent.

Co-Founder & CEO

Robert Herman

Principal · 01

A career spanning global production, creative entrepreneurship, and finding and championing distinctive talent.

My Hollywood story

It was 1984. I was driving around London in a van, delivering ¾ inch tapes to advertising agencies, with no idea where I was going and getting comprehensively lost. I was twenty. I'd left school without much of a plan.

But Soho had an energy I'd never felt before. Hyper-creative people, moving fast, making things. It was a whole new world and I wanted in. I spent the next few years trying to figure out who was actually making the money, and how the business worked.

I thought about post production. What you could do technically was changing so fast it was intoxicating. But it felt too contained. What I wanted was to get on a plane to somewhere I'd never been and film there. To be an explorer. So I got into production, started producing in my mid twenties, and built a reputation for finding unique talent.

In 1998, I was there at the beginning of Stink, two of us in a small office. What drove us from the start was a simple instinct: the best creative talent wasn’t all in one place. We found an advertising agency in Sweden, paired them with a maverick director from South Africa, and that was the idea. Being genuinely global in 1998 was unusual. Markets kept to themselves, geography was a barrier, and we treated it as an opportunity. As a partner, I helped build Stink from that small office into a global company, with offices in Berlin, Paris, Shanghai, São Paulo, New York, LA, and Moscow. A decade in Los Angeles running Ruffian followed, with campaigns for Apple, HP, JetBlue, Gillette, BMW, Frank Gehry and Warner Brothers, while the industry quietly changed around me.

The moment that crystallised everything came over breakfast with the global head of production at one of the largest advertising groups in the world. He told me they were moving all production between £300k and £900k in house. That represented roughly half of my work. My first thought wasn’t panic. It was a question: how are they going to find the talent for that? Three billion dollars of work, and no infrastructure to match it to the right people. That question became Distinkt.

Co-Founder & CTO

Chris Gibbin

Principal · 02

A career spanning film, television, production, digital media, and emerging technology.

My Hollywood story

It was 1986. Two days into summer break, I got a call to work as a PA on a movie one state over. I didn't know what a PA was or what they did, and I certainly had never worked on a movie. It didn't matter — it was a movie and I wanted it.

That job changed everything. It gave me a path. Long hours, six days a week and very little money, but they fed me and gave me a place to sleep. That was enough.

It didn't take too long before I thought I knew what I was doing. I didn't. I thought I had the answers. I often didn't. But I stayed in it. I worked my way up and was lucky enough to work with filmmakers including John Schlesinger, Nora Ephron, and Ivan Reitman, and to learn from David Fincher, Cameron Crowe, and John Sayles.

I did most jobs along the way — sets, props, painting, producing, directing, even some acting — and helped get films financed and sold.

At the same time, I built a parallel path: starting one of Los Angeles' early digital ad agencies in 1994, and later one of the first social media agencies in 2007.

Distinkt brings all of that experience together — film, television, digital, and social — to help talented people access opportunities wherever they are.

Co-Founder & CCO

Chris Day

Principal · 03

A communications leader whose career spans television, film, corporate and nearly two decades leading Corporate Communications at UTA.

My Hollywood story

It was 1989, New York City. I was out of school and working as a photo editor and freelance photographer. I knew my future was in media and entertainment, but I had no idea what path to take. Unexpectedly, I got an offer to work at a PR firm. I jumped at it. Four years later, I was in Los Angeles at another firm just like it. I was new to LA, but it didn’t take me more than a minute to realize LA was a company town, and the company was the entertainment industry. So I dove in. I boldly started a television division for a boutique film PR firm. I say boldly because I knew nothing about television. But I had a profound appreciation for people willing to put it all out there as artists, and that turned out to be the most important qualification.

I learned fast. Mostly I learned that the job wasn't really about media relations—it was service. You were holding something fragile: a person's work, a person's name, a person's sense of what they were trying to say, really their hopes and dreams. If you got that wrong, no amount of press placement mattered.

A few years in, I found myself working with David Chase. This was around the time a show of his called The Sopranos was about to change television. And the thing I remember isn't the coverage or the acclaim—it's what he taught me without ever meaning to.

Chase didn't say a lot. So I had to listen—and not just to the words. A year into the biggest show on television, watching how he worked with his UTA agents and his team, it clicked for me: the whole game is helping someone reach the thing they don’t always say out loud. The work they'd bet everything on. Do that well and you're not a vendor anymore. You're in the room.

That's the lesson I carried into everything after, including nearly two decades building and leading the corporate communications department at UTA through deals, acquisitions, crises, and the growth into one of the "big three." The same truth held at every scale. The most talented people in the world, and what they needed most was someone who would listen carefully enough to help them become who they were trying to be.

For years I’ve been keenly aware of the immense amount of talent in the world, each one with their own hopes and dreams. But the economics of professional representation has limited it to the tip of the global talent pool. That gap is something I haven’t stopped thinking about. It has become Distinkt.

Principal · 04

Lesley Wolff

VP of Talent Relations

A career in casting built around finding emerging talent and helping them reach the opportunities where they can do their best work.

My Hollywood story

In 1992, a playwriting award I won at the University of Pennsylvania led to a summer internship at the Mark Taper Forum, where the team was workshopping Tony Kushner's then-unknown play Angels in America. I arrived thinking about writing and left fascinated by casting.

On day one, I was sent to secure headshots by messenger for every potential actor in town. That summer I learned casting from the ground up: building relationships, coordinating sessions, and helping a team see who could bring the work to life. I lived in my cousin's actual garage in Santa Monica — no bathroom, no air conditioning, but, most importantly, no rent.

After graduation, I moved to Los Angeles and took a circuitous route through writing, acting, producing, and casting. I built a boutique agency and cast projects for Comedy Central, HBO, E!, and Netflix, finding emerging digital talent including SMOSH along the way.

For more than twenty-five years, I have also run Fresh Faces, a workshop that takes people from never having performed stand-up to the stage in five weeks.

I've spent my career finding people before anyone knew their names. Distinkt is the talent agency I wish had existed when I was messengering headshots around town — built to make discovery work at scale.

Advisor · 01

Frances Pennington

Brand communications · Global marketing · Creative leadership

A communications and creative leader whose career spans global fashion brands, music, and entertainment.

Career highlights

Frances Pennington has led communications, marketing, and creative work across fashion, music, and entertainment. She joined Tory Burch in 2010, leading global PR and brand communications, following her role as Vice President of Global Marketing at Juicy Couture.

Through her consultancy, she helped establish Soho House within the entertainment industry ahead of its Los Angeles club opening. She produced the Soho House Oscar Villa in Los Angeles and the Soho Beach House satellite club for Art Basel in Miami, and created partnerships with brands including MAC, Jaguar, Audi, Sony, and W Magazine.

As Head of Creative at DreamWorks Records, Pennington oversaw the visual identity of the label's artist roster, collaborating with artists, directors, photographers, and producers on artwork, music videos, and documentaries. Earlier, as Senior Vice President at EMI Music, she led creative marketing across artwork, video production, video promotion, and publicity, having previously served as Vice President of Publicity.

Advisor · 02

Lionel Wigram

Filmmaker · Producer · Former Warner Bros. executive

A producer and former Warner Bros. executive whose career spans studio and independent filmmaking.

Career highlights

Lionel Wigram is responsible for acquiring the HARRY POTTER books for Warner Bros. and for overseeing all eight films in the series, in partnership with David Heyman, first as an executive and then as a producer.

Wigram also wrote the initial pitch which inspired JK Rowling to tell the story of Newt Scamander in the three FANTASTIC BEASTS films. He worked on all three films as a producer.

Wigram’s re-imagination of the character of Sherlock Holmes became the film SHERLOCK HOLMES directed by Guy Ritchie and starring Robert Downey Jr, Jude Law and Rachel McAdams which Wigram wrote the story for and produced. He also wrote on and produced the sequel, SHERLOCK HOLMES: A GAME OF SHADOWS.

Wigram also co-wrote and produced THE MAN FROM UNCLE directed by Guy Ritchie and starring Henry Cavill, Alicia Vikander, Armie Hammer, Elizabeth Debicki and Hugh Grant. He also co-wrote and produced KING ARTHUR: LEGEND OF THE SWORD directed by Guy Ritchie and starring Charlie Hunnam and Jude Law.

As a studio executive, Wigram championed such films as THREE KINGS, CHARLOTTE GRAY, THE GOOD GERMAN and AUGUST RUSH.

Prior to joining Warner Bros, Wigram spent ten years working both as an executive and as a producer. He ran Renny Harlin and Geena Davis’ Company and worked for Shep Gordon and Carolyn Pfeiffer at Alive Films. Wigram’s first job in Hollywood was as a runner for producer Elliott Kastner. He worked his way up, eventually producing several low-budget films for Kastner in partnership with Cassian Elwes.

Wigram also collaborated with the celebrated author Cornelia Funke to co-create the story and world of the YA fantasy novel RECKLESS which has gone on to become an internationally best-selling book series.

Wigram has just directed his first film, the micro-budget feature PRIVATE ROAD which just won Best Film and Best Director at the Studio City Film Festival.

Advisor · 03

Glenn Williamson

Independent producer · Former studio executive

An independent producer and former studio executive with more than 25 years in the entertainment industry.

Career highlights

As a senior production executive at DreamWorks SKG, he supervised films including Sam Mendes' Oscar-winning American Beauty and Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous, before becoming Focus Features' founding President of Production, where he oversaw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Through his company Back Lot Pictures, he has produced Hollywoodland, Sunshine Cleaning, Push, and Sundance Audience Award winner Happythankyoumoreplease.

A member of the Producers Branch of the Academy, Williamson also served as co-head of the Producers Program at UCLA's School of Theater, Film and Television.