Studio City New Jersey Welcomes Cultural Entrepreneur Roland Laird to Team

Aug. 28, 2010 - PRLog -- Studio City New Jersey founder Shelton Minor has announced that Posro Media CEO Roland Laird has joined the film and media production complex's team as a key adviser. Laird will provide his business development expertise to refine the studio’s growth strategy, ramp up marketing, and secure funds to complete the build-out of the 85,000 square foot facility in Trenton, New Jersey.

Studio City New Jersey is only the fourth African American owned studio facility in the US and the first in NJ. The others are Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Studios in Chicago, Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta, and New Millennium Studios in Petersburg, VA owned by actor Tim Reid, best known for his work on WKRP in Cincinnati.

For Minor – a filmmaker and photographer originally from Harlem – Studio City New Jersey is the realization of an eight-year-old dream of having a cost effective version of a Hollywood-style motion picture studio in New Jersey. The Studio City complex opened in May of this year and features soundstages in various sizes, video editing suites, a photography studio, and rehearsal space. Studio City New Jersey has the largest “green screen” in New Jersey, a 12,000 sq ft. Cyc wall large enough to accommodate vehicles and action scenes.

Minor also has a music recording studio under construction and hopes to add a film school in a future phase of development.

A Trenton resident, cultural entrepreneur Laird is originally from Hollis, Queens by way of Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. He launched Posro as a comic book publishing company in the early 1990s and today the company is a niche media producer specializing in African American culture. Laird is a cultural critic for popular blog sites like PopMatters.com, TheLoop21.com, and TheRoot.com; Laird is the author of the critically acclaimed Still I Rise: A Graphic History of African Americans; and co-founder and Managing Director of My Image Studios (MIST), a $11 million dollar "green" convergent entertainment venue coming to Harlem in 2011. MIST is designed to highlight the art and culture of the African and Latino Diaspora and earlier this year MIST received an allocation of $2.1 million in stimulus bond financing from the New York City Capital Resource Corporation.

Until October 2008 Laird was the Vice President of Technology at Swiss American Securities where he developed a strategy that helped the broker-dealer firm remain profitable post the 9/11/01 terrorist attacks and generate over $41 million in revenue. When Credit Suisse Group decided to cease operations of the subsidiary SASI, Laird decided to strike out on his own as a cultural and entertainment entrepreneur.

“I believe that helping Shelton realize the full vision of Studio City New Jersey will also help revitalize my adopted home city of Trenton,” said Laird. “I'm excited to be on board.”

# # #

Founded by cultural entrepeneur Roland Laird, Posro Media ia a niche media producer specialing in African American culture.