Liz Ireland & Kathleen Smith
Kathleen Smith is a seasoned marketing and communications specialist, Kathleen spent more than over 20 years in the entertainment and cultural arts industries, primarily for Disney Channel Worldwide and Woodruff Arts Center. These positions allowed her to indulge her passion for travel. She extensively explored the U.S. and Europe, producing Disney Channel's The Art of Disney Animation and Woodruff's Montreux Jazz Festival in Atlanta (co-produced with Switzerland's Montreux Jazz Festival and the City of Atlanta.) She has written articles and op-ed pieces, annual reports, foundation grant proposals and many senior executive speeches.
Exciting as that had been, she longed always to pen her own project. While working with The Disney Channel she met her future writing partner, Liz Ireland, and they began searching for the right project to produce together. That aha! moment arrived in 2006 at a women's retreat in western Georgia. Soon after, Kathleen left her position as VP of Communications & Center Initiatives for Woodruff Arts Center and embarked on her own writing career. She currently consults on integrated marketing communications programs for organizations in Atlanta, while working with Liz on their first non-fiction book, Women of Vision: Ordinary Women, Extraordinary Lives.
Kathleen believes success is found by living passionately, producing prosperously and always driving a convertible.
Liz Ireland found her passion for the theater at an early age. After finishing graduate school, she embarked upon a career as an Instructor in the Performing Arts Center of a liberal arts college in northern Illinois. For ten years Liz taught, directed and managed house operations for a vibrant performing arts program and wrote or re-wrote a number of plays. She lived, breathed and celebrated in her theatrical life. After receiving tenure and an Associate Professorship, she promptly took a well deserved sabbatical and decided her passion was not in theater. Her real passion was for writing and she turned her talents to screenwriting, eventually writing and collaborating on fifteen screenplays. Two of her own scripts were semi-finalists for the Don and Gee Nicholl Fellowship in screenwriting sponsored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, while four other scripts were optioned, but remain unproduced. While working at Disney Channel Worldwide she met a soul sister in Kathleen and the two began a quest for their own project.
Having discarded numerous creative projects together, they finally formulated the Women of Vision project after attending a Women's Renewal Retreat in the fall of 2006. The result has brought them both great joy as well as unbound enthusiasm for all the wonderful women of vision they encounter.
Today, Liz is primary caregiver for her 93-year old mother-in-law and beautiful adopted eleven-year old Chinese daughter. She now sees herself as the heroine in her own comedy-adventure film.
