The energy has shifted and now physically it’s starting to match the energy when you see all of the development happening downtown,” she said. “I feel that’s been happening for quite some time. “For instance, the Italian festival wants to come downtown then I work with them to do all the mapping and get all of their paperwork together and permits secured,” Clarke-Penella said.įrom the perspective of both of her roles, Clarke-Penella said she can see the city of Youngstown heading toward a “renaissance” or a “resurgance” after decades of being down. That entails reporting to the mayor and ensuring that road workers, police, local businesses, stakeholders, fire department crews are always in sync with what’s going on in the city. Navigating the role of events coordinator, Clarke-Penella said the job requires a “combination of logistics,” to ensure the safety component of event planning is covered.
“I was impressed by what she’s done in New York and elsewhere,” Brown said previously. In May 2022, Mayor Jamael Tito Brown hired Clarke-Penella for the role of downtown events and citywide special projects coordinator, a job that had been vacant since January 2020.
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“A half a million dollar movie is not large scale, but it does make an economic impact in a small town when it’s done consistently,” Clarke-Penella said. To staff the movie, she stayed local when putting together crew members and pulling in local vendors prioritizing some of the area’s local mom and pop businesses. “That movie brought about $500,000 worth of jobs and spending for two weeks,” Clarke-Penella said. One of them, a thriller titled “The Housekeeper” features names like Denise Richards, Richard Gunn and Illean Almaguer in a film about a young housekeeper who takes a job for a wealthy family with a dark secret that was filmed for two weeks. The crew just wrapped production on the studio’s fourth feature film, “Find Them,” with two more films coming soon to the streaming service Tubi.ĭespite a career that has seen her on set of major Hollywood projects, the writer and director said she always brags the most about what her small indie team has been able to do locally. “Ofcourse we value and appreciate our male colleagues as well, but it’s quite rare to see such a tight-knit group of women consistently working together in the independent film industry,” she said. She also has produced three film shorts, also in the Youngstown area.Ĭlarke-Penella works alongside a crew mostly made up of women, a choice Clarke-Penella said doesn’t come at the slighting of men, but rather to highlight a group underrepresented in the industry. Clarke-Penella also was once the associate director of admissions for the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, where she studied film animation.Īfter 15 years of living in New York City, where she held many titles - including as a production assistant for the large scale Fort Greene Festival - Clarke-Penella returned home to Youngstown during the pandemic.Ī short time later, Clarke-Penella became the owner and executive producer of “Youngstown Pictures,” a local production company that already has filmed several features in the city. Her career has seen her as a publicist for Lexicon Public Relations of New York City and Los Angeles and the vice president of Digital Launch, a New York marketing and management firm. She’s been an entertainment manager and producer in the music industry, working with Grammy-nominated, billboard-charting artists. Since then, the now 40-year-old Clarke-Penella has had a career that has kept the self-titled “master multitasker” dabbling in film, music and event coordination. And I was never afraid of it because I always saw the potential of this area,” Clarke-Penella said. “I never thought that that was the endgame for us. She also worked at the Red Cross, meaning Clarke-Penella would often travel along with her to visit terminally ill AIDS patients.Ĭlarke-Penella’s upbringing gave her a deeper appreciation for the city of Youngstown and never let the title of the city as the “murder capital” limit where life in the city would take her. Her mother, who Clarke-Penella described as a “trailblazer” was a psychiatrist for children with behavioral disorders. “Or if the symphony, the Uptown Theater, Easy Street Productions, if anything was happening, I was going.” “We barely had two dimes to rub together but if a Broadway show came through Stambaugh Auditorium, I went to that,” Clarke-Penella said.
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