Former Luma AI Exec Launches Production Company Matriarch
EXCLUSIVE: Verena Puhm, a former Luma AI exec and filmmaker, has launched LA-based production company Matriarch.
Puhm, who was most recently Head of Dream Lab LA at Luma AI, is now developing and producing AI-native and hybrid productions and will also carry out work for third parties and brands.
Matriarch’s development slate includes Colors in the Dark, a hybrid drama series; All the Leading Men, an adult animated comedy series; G-Pigs, a horror feature; and Chomper Romp, an animated short-form series currently in financing discussions.
The company says its creative collaborators will include director, AI creator and musician TEDRA aka TT The Artist, whose credits include collaborations and placements with Diplo and Alicia Keys, as well as Netflix, HBO’s Insecure, P-Valley, and Lena Waithe’s Twenties; music producer and sound designer Joachim M. Weber, former composer and audio designer at ProSiebenSat.1; and creative technologist, director, producer, and VFX artist, David Sulpizio.
At the self-funded company, Puhm is joined by producer Morenike Dosu, who has worked at MPC, Framestore and DreamWorks Animation. Consultants include James Stowe and Courtney Feemster.
“We’re building a studio for where entertainment is going,” said Puhm. “The core business is storytelling: developing our own IP and producing projects for partners. But we’re building the technology alongside that work instead of trying to bolt it onto a traditional studio structure later.”
At the center of that new tech effort is what the company describes as “Affective Content Intelligence”, Matriarch’s “proprietary approach to understanding how audiences respond to media”. The company says it is developing systems that “combine biometric signals, self-reported emotional intent and information about the content viewed to better understand the relationship between entertainment and emotional and physiological response…rather than relying only on clicks, completion rates or traditional audience research, Matriarch is exploring how audience response can become an additional input into creative development, content discovery and greenlighting.”
“Most entertainment technology is built to predict what you will watch next,” said Puhm. “We want to understand what you are looking to feel, how a piece of entertainment affects you and what we can learn from that response. When that intelligence is connected directly to a studio, it can inform not only discovery, but what gets made.”
Puhm served as lead AI artist on Free Leonard Peltier, the Sundance 2025 documentary and had stints as a writer at Leonine Studio’s Wiedemann & Berg TV and Red Bull Media’s Terra Mater Studios. She was a co-director and co-producer on 2023 documentary Disaster at Devil’s Jaw and she was an early AI filmmaking instructor for Sundance Collab.
