When Kerstin Emhoff and Paul Hunter opened the doors of Prettybird in 2007, things didn’t come easy. As a woman and a Black man founding a startup production company, they felt they had to be deliberate about their choices and their positioning. Hunter, though at the time already an A-List director, recalls wanting to avoid promoting Prettybird as a “Black-owned” business. “Kerstin and I were trying to fight against that, even though I was leading the charge as director because there was a limited amount of work, and the creative scene at the time was sort of dumbed down, which was a real issue,” he says.
