The Team
VERT is a director-led studio that makes vertical work with real craft. We bring together directors, writers and creators who know the format, and we back them with the client service a brand or cause needs to trust us with its message.
This bid brings together VERT's founder, a director with 830M+ microdrama views this year, and a writing team whose credits run from Frasier to PBS's Sid the Science Kid, a show that taught kids through entertainment.
Hope Dotson Farley
Hope Dotson Farley is an advertising and media executive and entrepreneur with more than 25 years in the entertainment business. She founded VERT to elevate vertical storytelling, pairing real craft with the client service a brand or cause needs to trust it with their message. She began her career at Radical Media and produced for companies including Smuggler and Partizan. In 2013 she co-founded Adolescent Content, which she led for over a decade as COO and Executive Producer, building award-winning campaigns for Target, Levi's, Chevy, Always and LG, including the Shorty Award-winning Life's Good campaign. Her public-interest work includes Power to Decide and the States of California and New Mexico. She serves on the board of 300 for 300, a nonprofit supporting Black girls in creative fields, and has written for Adweek, Campaign US and MediaPost.
Kristen Brancaccio
Kristen Brancaccio is a writer-director who has directed more than 18 microdramas and is set to direct her first feature-length film for Dolphin Films in early 2027.
She most recently directed Issa Rae's debut vertical series Screen Time, which garnered over 250 million views in its first month on TikTok. Her Audible series Southern Belle Insults, starring Keke Palmer, Phaedra Parks, and Zachariah Parks, premiered in August 2026.
She also wrote and directed Hollywood Starlet for the new app aTwist, produced by Bradley Bell (The Bold and the Beautiful). Her series Heartstrings and Lies for Shorts won a Telly Award for Best Vertical Video Series this year. Her vertical work spans ReelShort, NetShort, and DramaShorts, among others. She is attached to direct both the microdrama and feature length adaptation of Clarence Hammond's original short-story Summer Session with Ancora Entertainment.
Before verticals, Kristen was a top-10 directing finalist on HBO's Project Greenlight for her short Day One, and wrote and directed the action-romance pilot Resistance for SYFY. She also has extensive music video credits.
Katy Garretson & Micah Goldman
As a team, Micah Goldman & Katy Garretson optioned their first two feature-length projects to Reckless Pictures and Basset Hound Distribution. They've also sold five vertical series in multiple genres (noir, period, comedy, drama, holiday) to Giovanni Entertainment, and have two YA vertical series, The Prom Revenge Pact and Senior Smear Campaign, in pre-production with Shorties Studios and CheraTV. They have multiple additional microseries currently being pitched.
Katy Garretson is a Los Angeles-based writer, director, producer, podcaster and professor. She began her award-winning directing career on the TV series Frasier and was nominated for a Directors Guild of America (DGA) Award for her directorial debut. She has since directed over 100 episodes of television, including Two Broke Girls, Fuller House, School of Rock, and three seasons of the animated series Sid the Science Kid, for PBS. Katy is the recipient of the DGA's prestigious Frank Capra Career Achievement Award. Katy also developed and produced a series of sixteen hit movies, the Garage Sale Mysteries, for the Hallmark Channel, hosted the podcast Mojo Girl Madness, and for years was a Professor of Directing, Production and Storytelling to both graduate and undergraduate students of the School of Cinematic Arts at her alma mater, USC.
Micah Goldman is a Los Angeles-based writer and producer. He began his career as a writers' assistant on a TV Land sitcom before writing and producing Tease, a dramedy pilot for Fox Television Studios. He later produced the John Landis-executive-produced horror comedy Some Guy Who Kills People. As a former Creative Executive at Industry Arts, Micah provided development feedback for several years on high-profile projects, including Shia LaBeouf's Honey Boy and Netflix's The Wedding Season. He is also an Executive Producer on Stripper Boyz, a comedy feature streaming on Apple. Most recently, Micah wrote two vertical rom-com series for Refinery Media, distributed by FareFlow, and he currently works full-time as a vertical drama writer for DramaWave.