Ashley Avis is a filmmaker and passionate, longtime equestrian. She is the writer, director and editor of the upcoming Black Beauty for Disney+, starring Oscar winner Kate Winslet as the voice of Beauty, Mackenzie Foy as Jo Green, and Iain Glen as John Manly.
Black Beauty will mark Ashley’s forth feature film, in addition to directing hundreds of commercials and branded content to date. Her first independent films were Deserted (2016), and Adolescence (2018).
Upcoming projects include writing and show running the television series Breyer Hollow for Imagine Entertainment’s Executive Producers Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, and Stephanie Sperber; as well as directing and producing the documentary Wild Beauty: Mustang Spirit of the West (2021).
Commercially Ashley is known for the elegance and storytelling found in her short-form work. In 2016, she won the Mercedes-Benz Award for her auto-fashion fusion spot “Bespoke,” and in 2019 she directed as well as edited Chevrolet’s fourteen-part “Goalkeepers” campaign featuring Olympians Mia Hamm, Hilary Knight, and Laurie Hernandez— encouraging young girls to stay in sports.
An editor of over a decade, she cuts the majority of her own work— and is the co-founder of Winterstone Pictures, a boutique production company in Marina del Rey, California.
Ashley’s visual style has been called “timelessly romantic” (White Lies Magazine).
In the fall of 2020, Ashley founded and launched The Wild Beauty Foundation— a new organization that hopes to illuminate key issues wild and domestic horses are facing today through entertainment, youth-focused educational programs, and on the ground rescue efforts.
Ashley lives near the ocean with her husband and producing partner Edward Winters. Ashley and Ed recently adopted two wild horses of her own— rescuing them from holding pens in Nevada after witnessing a helicopter roundup in 2019. They are called Zephyra (for “goddess of the West wind”) and Zion (her “sun”). To date, Ashley has personally rescued over twenty horses and several burros, adopting them out to new homes.
