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Lisa Cortés is an innovative, Emmy-award winning filmmaker from Milford, Connecticut. Her mother was an aircraft inspector and her father was an entrepreneur working in Harlem, New York. Lisa attended school in Milford, participating in piano recitals and children’s theater productions. Through these activities and the support of her parents, Lisa developed confidence and a deep appreciation for storytelling.

After graduating from Milford Academy as valedictorian, Lisa attended nearby Yale University in New Haven, earning a Bachelor’s degree in American Studies with a focus on Black literature. In her first job, at the recording label Def Jam, she helped usher in the era when hip hop crossed into the mainstream and exploded in popularity around the world. The hip hop phenomenon led her to found Rush Producers Management, where she represented producers working on a variety of projects.

Lisa next became Vice President of A&R at Mercury Records, a division of Polygram Records, where she developed new recording artists and  launched her own music recording label at PolyGram, Loose Cannon Records, becoming the first African-American woman with her own label with a major record company.

 In 1996, Lisa traveled to India, where she re-discovered her love of stories and the power of cinema to tell those stories.  Returning to New York, she decided to take her career in that direction, and subsequently enrolled in a six-week workshop at the New York Film Academy. After completion of the workshop, she collaborated with young filmmakers and developed contacts in the industry.

 A turning point in Lisa’s movie career came one day when she received a call from filmmaker Lee Daniels, who invited her to work with him in New Orleans on Monster’s Ball.  She then joined Lee Daniels Entertainment, where she worked as a producer of Shadowboxer in 2005, and executive producer of the 2009 Academy-Award and Sundance winning film Precious.

 After the success of Precious, Lisa founded her own company, Cortés Filmworks, and worked on a broad range of projects, including two short films shot on the African continent (Kwaku Ananse, Imagine the Future) and a feature film set in Curacao (Double Play).  More recently, Lisa produced and directed acclaimed and award-winning documentaries, including  The Remix: Hip Hop X Fashion (2019), The Apollo (2020), and All In: The Fight for Democracy (2021). In 2023, she produced and directed two films: The Space Race, and Little Richard: I Am Everything. The latter made its world premiere as the opening night selection in the US documentary competition at the Sundance Film Festival. Also premiering at Sundance was Invisible Beauty, which she produced.

 The enduring thread woven through Lisa’s extraordinary career in both the music and film industries continues to be the narrative power of storytelling to educate, inspire, and transform listeners and audiences by shedding light on the voices and lives of diverse people.