Caitlin Foito '97

Caitlin Foito is devoting her career to telling stories.

As Senior VP of Development at Miramax Television, she is currently running the television department and overseeing all pitches and series in development and pre-production.

“I work with writers to shape and hone their series pitches, whether it’s a germ of an idea or more fully formed,” explains Caitlin, speaking on the phone from her office in Los Angeles. “First I help them present their idea to buyers. Once it’s set up at a network or streamer, I, as the studio partner, advocate for the creator and help them see their vision through the writing process, production, and into series.”

Before landing at Miramax in 2018, Caitlin served as VP of drama development for ABC Studios, where she oversaw the development of The Crossing, For the People, and The Catch for ABC, as well as Code Black for CBS. Before her move to ABC Studios in 2014, she was director of drama programming for Fox, where she developed numerous pilots and series, including Almost Human and Empire. Prior to that, she spent seven years at Fox Television Studios, where she oversaw Lights Out and The Riches.

Giving Stories New Life

“TV is a really powerful medium,” says Caitlin, who is married to writer Evan Bleiweiss. Their son, Archie, is two years old, and daughter, Zelda, (named after Zelda Fitzgerald) is six. “You want to entertain first and foremost, but you endeavor to produce series that are a positive contribution.”

At Miramax Caitlin decides which film titles in the library will be developed into television shows. “If we’re going to update titles there needs to be an obvious reason to do so,” reveals Caitlin. “If we’re doing a remake, I want to somehow elevate the source material. I’m mostly looking to identify which stories in our library will resonate and feel topical, but a series can also give a title new life; you can dig in and tell a much more nuanced version of the story in a series than you can in a film.”

The Right Medium

Caitlin, whose first love of storytelling was theater, participated in a summer program at Boston University Theater Institute between her sophomore and junior year at Northwest. In her script analysis class, everything “just clicked.” She went on to complete many internships in various parts of the entertainment industry from junior year of high school through college, searching for where she fit best. After obtaining her B.A. in History and Political Science from Smith College, she moved to Los Angeles and started as an assistant at Creative Artists Agency (CAA).

Initially, Caitlin set her sights on becoming a feature film producer but, in the early 2000s, TV was exploding, and she was drawn to the momentum of a different kind of storytelling.

“Between The Shield, The Sopranos, 24, and Desperate Housewives, TV was becoming the medium for characterdriven stories,” Caitlin explains. “As a consumer, you can have characters on your TV in your living room—and in your head—for dozens of episodes and over multiple years. That’s a relationship. As content creators we have the opportunity to penetrate the bubbles we all live in by rendering representative characters and putting them in people’s lives through screens.”

She was hired as an assistant to the head of scripted television and worked her way up to director at Fox Television Studios (FTVS), where she was then a participant in 20th Century Fox’s High Potential Executive Program.

The Value of a Good Audience

Seven years later Caitlin decided to jump over to the “network side” to become what is called a buyer– the person to whom writers pitch their ideas. She thought it was critical to learn the buying side of the business.

“When I became a buyer, I remembered what Mark Sheppard, my theatre teacher at NWS, said: ‘Good theatre is only achievable with a good audience,’” recalls Caitlin. “I understood that if you are a good audience the writers will relax and give you their best. There’s no reason to have a poker face—you want their pitch to succeed.”

Ultimately, Caitlin decided she was happiest in the “studio side” of the business and, in 2014, she made the switch back, becoming VP of drama development at ABC Studios where she sold and developed over 50 pilot scripts and eight series.

03 Caitlin, with her husband, Evan, and attorney Marcia Clark, at the2016 Emmy Awards. (Behind Caitlin is Sarah Paulson, who won an Emmy that evening for her portrayal of Clark in The People v. O. J. Simpson.)

Lessons from the Arts

Caitlin credits Northwest with laying the foundation for her career. Humanities was her favorite subject, partly because the passion of all the teachers who taught Humanities at Northwest “was infectious.”

“Every single Humanities teacher at Northwest, along with the brilliantly integrated curriculum plan, brought context to help us understand history, rather than memorizing it. Paul Raymond would give a lecture on Vietnam from a very personal point of view,” remembers Caitlin. “We learned about history by hearing his own experiences. History was personal, not theoretical. It was intimate and immediate—it was hard not to feel activated. There is a very real correlation between my NWS Humanities education and the responsibility and POV I now have as a television content creator.”

Also important to her development were the arts classes, according to Caitlin. “Laura Ferri and Mark Sheppard kept me excited about theatre—they were so supportive of me and my growth as an actor. And there were life lessons I learned in Leah Kosh’s drawing class. She taught me that mistakes are the best part if you’re open to them: don’t fixate on what your piece is going to look like. Let go of the end result.”

Caitlin says that concept of being open to surprises has guided her in both career and life. “I thought I wanted to be a film producer and if I hadn’t been open to television, I would’ve missed out on all of this—and I’ve really found my lane.”