Yara Shahidi signs major TV deal and launches production company

We’re about to see and hear a lot more from Yara Shahidi and that's great-ish news. Scratch that, it's just great. The actress has just signed a massive deal with ABC Studios that will put her in the driver’s seat for creating new scripted and alternative television projects for cable, streaming and broadcast. Project a Yara Shahidi show on the back of a cereal box; it'll get watched.According to Deadline, Yara, and her mom and business partner Keri Shahidi, are launching a new production company together, 7^th Sun. The Shahidis will base their new production company at ABC Studios, where Yara has starred as Zoey Johnson since 2014 in the Kenya Barris series black-ish and now in her own spin-off, grown-ish. For her role as Zoey, Shahidi has earned a NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series and BET Award for YoungStar.

 

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7th Sun Productions ⚡️ The vision is set. The slate is built. Grateful to my ABC family & excited to join the television landscape to collaborate and push forward the stories of our many intersections #7thSun THANK YOU BOSSMAN FOR PAVING THE WAY @kenyabarris

A post shared by Yara (يارا‎) Shahidi (@yarashahidi) on Jul 20, 2020 at 12:16pm PDT

“I’m thrilled to be partnering with my home family, ABC Studios, in this exciting next chapter, alongside my family,” Shahidi said in a statement. “It’s exciting to add our production company to the roster of my peers and mentors who are also actively committed to sharing meaningful stories.” The Shahidis are set to bring on NBC International executive Lajoie St. George, who will help the company “elevate underrepresented voices” and “pursue projects that touch upon themes of history, heritage, culture, and joy.”[video_embed id='1993445']RELATED: What We're Watching: Black lives in the spotlight[/video_embed]At only 20, Shahidi is certainly young to be the head of a major production company, but her resume is already well beyond her years and Barris revealed to the Hollywood Reporter that his nickname for her underlines how far he thinks she'll go."She is insanely talented, unreasonably smart and hardworking beyond compare. I've called her 'McMogul' for years, and seeing all that she has accomplished should come as no surprise to anyone that knows her. This deal is just the beginning for Yara, and I'm excited to see where she takes this next chapter and the storyteller she becomes."The Harvard student helped create the new series Mixed-ish with Barris, making her the youngest producer on the ABC network. She’s already launched two major organizations, including Eighteen x 18, which encourages young people to vote, and Yara’s Club, a digital meet-up for high school students where they could talk about their future with their peers. As for the whole Harvard thing, Shahidi enrolled in 2018 and signed up as a double major after receiving a letter of recommendation from Michelle Obama.Shahidi has been one of the most exciting and refreshing voices in Hollywood for years, not only for her work on screen, but also for her activism off-screen. When she’s not acting on TV or starring in feature films, partnering with Adidas, being interviewed for Meghan Markle’s issue of Vogue, helping to plan virtual high school graduations with Barack Obama and LeBron James, or attending the MET Gala, Shahidi is using her platform to advocate for Black Lives Matter and education.Shahidi was recently interviewed by Elle and talked about using her platform for social justice and the importance of showing stories starring Black people and written by Black people. “I think the difference [in the past] was a lot of work was pretty quiet and there wasn’t as much of a public narrative around it, but the work was still being done. And so I think when I stepped into the space of being a series regular on a show, I was already involved in a cast, but also in a larger Black entertainment community that was consistently reckoning with questions like, ‘What is our role on television? What are the obligations we need our networks to make? And what are the environments that we need to live in to consistently make sure that we are responsible with our media?’”[video_embed id='1997366']BEFORE YOU GO: Ava DuVernay making leap to unscripted TV with ‘social experiment’[/video_embed]