Women in Arts and Media

Mina V. Esguerra writes and publishes English-language romance and contemporary fiction. Her contemporary romance novellas have won Filipino Readers’ Choice Awards, and have been featured on NPR, Buzzfeed, the Seattle Review of Books, and more. She is an advocate for Filipino authors and readers, and delivers lectures regularly on topics such as writing, publishing, guiding creative communities, and making the romance genre more inclusive. She founded RomanceClass, a community of Filipino authors who write romance in English, and since 2013 has helped over 100 authors write and publish their romance books, now read in 52 countries worldwide. She is also a media adaptation agent, working with LA-based Bold MP to develop romance media by Filipino creatives for an international audience. Visit minavesguerra.com for more information about her books and projects.

Patricia Evangelista is a trauma journalist and former investigative reporter for the Philippine news company Rappler. Her debut book, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country, an account of the Philippine drug war, was hailed as “a journalistic masterpiece” by the New Yorker.

The book, released October 2023 by Random House, was a New York Times Top 10 Best Books of the Year, A New Yorker and The Economist Best Book of the Year, and was Time Magazine’s #1 Nonfiction Book of the Year. It has since won the NYPL Helen Bernstein Book Award and was longlisted for the Moore Prize for Human Rights and the PEN Galbraith Award. She lives in Manila.

Tanya Yuson is a founding partner and Chief Creative Development officer of BASE Entertainment, a studio based out of Jakarta and Singapore that develops, finances, produces and distributes content for the Indonesian market, as well as for the international market. She is the Executive Producer and writer for the Netflix Original Anime Series Trese, Prime Video’s Comedy Island for the Philippine and Indonesian version, and co-showrunner (Executive Producer and Head Writer) for Cigarette Girl, Indonesia’s first Netflix Original Series, which debuted at the Busan International Film Festival and won Best-Miniseries at the 2024 Seoul International Drama Awards.

Currently, BASE has a slate of projects in varying stages of development and pre-production, including a slate of movies that are co-productions with CJ Entertainment and Ivanhoe, the first of which is Joko Anwar’s film Impetigore, which had its world premiere at Sundance in 2020 and won the top prize at the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival in South Korea. Aside from Trese, BASE also has its live-action series Quarantine Tales on Netflix, as well as the films Respati, My Annoying Brother, and The Adventures of Sherina 2. Prior to founding BASE, Tanya spent 14 years in New York and Los Angeles where she worked in development for studios such as New Line Cinema and The Walt Disney Company. She then went on to be a producer and an executive at Millar Gough Ink, a production company whose principals were Al Gough and Miles Millar, where she worked on company projects such as Smallville for TV and feature films such as The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, Hannah Montana: The Movie and I Am Number Four, to name a few. Tanya was also a consultant for the Dino de Laurentiis company in Los Angeles.