- Ashley Avis, director behind Disney+'s Black Beauty and the Critics Choice-nominated documentary Wild Beauty: Mustang Spirit of the West, has signed with Creative Artists Agency (CAA) for Film/TV Literary representation.
- She will be repped by agents Hannah Davis and Mollie Glick in CAA's Motion Picture Literary department.
- Avis has two major projects in the pipeline: City of Angels for Warner Bros. and American Wolf, based on the New York Times bestseller for Appian Way, with Leonardo DiCaprio producing.
- The signing follows CAA's expanding push to represent filmmaker-writers across film and literary, with Hannah Davis having recently joined CAA's motion picture literary department in April 2026.
Ashley Avis has officially signed with Creative Artists Agency (CAA) for Film/TV Literary representation, with agents Hannah Davis and Mollie Glick leading her representation in CAA’s Motion Picture Literary department.
Avis is best known for writing, directing, and editing Disney+’s Black Beauty (2020), starring Kate Winslet and Mackenzie Foy, a film hailed as a “gorgeous, sweeping epic.”
She followed that with the award-winning documentary Wild Beauty: Mustang Spirit of the West (2022), which earned a Critics Choice nomination, a Special Congressional Commendation, and landed on top Oscar contender lists in trade publications.
Avis now heads into her most commercially ambitious phase yet. She is set to write and direct City of Angels for Warner Bros. and American Wolf for Appian Way with Leonardo DiCaprio producing.
CAA’s Film/TV Literary department has been on an active signing streak, recently adding Tanner Zagarino and Jessica Alba to their roster, signaling the agency’s continued investment in multihyphenate talent who write, direct, and produce at the studio level.
Takeaways
This signing marks a clear inflection point in Ashley Avis’s career. Moving from independent production and a Disney+ streaming deal into back-to-back studio projects: one at Warner Bros., one with a DiCaprio-backed producing entity, signals that Avis is being positioned as a top-tier filmmaker-writer, not just a niche nature documentary director.
Pairing her with both Hannah Davis (freshly established in CAA’s motion picture literary department) and veteran literary powerhouse Mollie Glick suggests CAA is making a dual play, developing her IP pipeline on the literary side while driving her projects aggressively through the studio system.
With City of Angels at Warner Bros. and American Wolf backed by Leonardo DiCaprio, does Avis become one of the most in-demand director-writers working in prestige studio fare? Will this signing accelerate a wider trend of nature/documentary-focused filmmakers crossing over into big-budget studio narratives?
