DAM New York 2019

Mario L Baeza is the Founder and CEO of Tropix Media & Entertainment, a company whose mission is "to take the best of Cuba to the World and bring the best of the World to Cuba." Following a pioneering 20-year career as an associate and then partner in the international law firm of Debevoise & Plimpton, Mario went on to become Vice Chairman and President of a major international investment bank, formed and led TCW/Latin America Partners, the manager of one of that region's first private equity funds, with over $300 million under management; ‎and in 2006, founded V-Me Media Company, a public/private partnership formed with over 40 PBS public television stations to provide high quality Spanish language television broadcast programming to over 70 million U.S. households, including over 80% of all U.S. Hispanic households in the country. Along the way, Mario was also one of the Co-founders of Jazz @ Lincoln Center and served as Founding Chairman of the NYC Latin Media & Entertainment Commission under Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He also served on numerous corporate boards, including serving as the Presiding Director of Tommy Hilfiger, Inc. Mario has also Executive Produced several critically-acclaimed feature films, for one of which he composed the film’s theme song. Later, Mario formed AJM Records, which launched the career of Grammy Award winning Hip Hop/R&B singer, “Ashanti,” whose first album set records for the sale of albums by a female artist and landed her in the Guinness Book of Records for being the first female artist to have five songs in the Billboard Top Ten Pop Charts at the same time, a feat equaled only by the Beatles. In 2015, Mario formed Tropix Media & Entertainment, a data-driven content creation, production and distribution company. In 2016 Tropix entered into an historic agreement to preserve the cultural legacy of the Cuban people by digitizing the entire audiovisual and radio archives of Cuba, some 500,000 hours of content. As part of the agreement, Tropix has preferential rights to use, own and globally commercialize any digitized archival material it selects in connection with new productions undertaken by Tropix for any medium.