Nick Berry(XIII)
- Producer
- Additional Crew
- Director
I was always a super creative child; I remember always making films with our Jurassic Park toys and creating mini-reality shows like having the neighborhood kids play Survivor and filming the tribal councils. In 5th grade, I was picked to do the school news and kind of loved it. In 7th grade, I was voted most creative for our school's superlatives and was still doing the school news shows, and that carried on throughout high school. I had a deep interest in music and film and moved to Nashville from Florida to kind of see where that would take me. I moved to LA from Nashville, TN in 2010. I was doing some freelance work for ABC and their coverage of the CMA awards and was offered a production coordinator job out in Los Angeles. It was wild, I was told of the job on a Monday, I was officially offered the following Friday and it happened to be the last day to withdraw from classes at MTSU where I was currently enrolled and studying Mass Communications. I withdrew from the university and drove out to LA that weekend with just some crazy dreams of Hollywood and only knowing a handful of people. I learned so much working with some great people at Disney/ABC Television Group. It was a new set every day, we'd shoot and produce everything from sponsorships, set visits, DVD special features, and derivative content for all the shows on the network at that time from Dancing With The Stars to The Bachelor to Wipeout, and even the Oscars. We even won a creative arts Emmy for outstanding creative achievement in interactive media for our Oscars red carpet coverage. Aside from music and film, I was always super enthralled in sports. I swam competitively growing up and joined a few sports rec leagues around town, such as Weho Dodgeball, Outloud Sports, and GLASA. I started working on America's Got Talent season 11 in 2016 and am now the department head as we gear up for season 19 to start filming at the end of March. As the supervising digital producer for the show, our digital numbers are HUGE. The team does an amazing job; we garnered over 3 billion views last year alone, and our YouTube channel just crossed 27 million subscribers. My partner Joe Schmelzer is an amazing photographer and does this photo series called "Life with Nick," and it's fun to see where all those photos end up, from magazines to walls all over the world. I also volunteer a lot of my time as one of the executive committee board members for the Sin City Classic. It's the largest annual LGBT+ sporting event in the world; we have 20+ sports and 10K athletes competing in Las Vegas every year during MLK weekend. It's really great to bring my love for our community, and production skills to this festival, we just had Natasha Bedingfield and Sasha Colby performing at our closing party last month, and it was our biggest year ever. I still have dreams of expanding the festival and finishing a few screenplays. I don't think my creative aspirations will ever slow down.