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-{{ovation.company}}Identifying, Nurturing, and Retaining Talent
Tara's entire career has been finding and incubating good ideas and new voices. From helping to break new voices like Key & Peele, to re-invigorating the careers of legends like David Spade, she spent a decade understanding what to look for in talent and how to build a culture where they CAN shine. Tara shares her formula on how to become an expert in finding and nurturing great talent, which can be applied to any job or idea you are trying to launch. She also gives honest, straightforward advice for growing and nurturing your own talent, women’s empowerment, letting go of limiting beliefs, and advocating for yourself and others.
Buy Yourself the Lilies
Drawing on her own personal story of overcoming trauma and mental health challenges, Tara inspires and empowers audiences through her raw and hilarious stories of hitting rock bottom, re-parenting herself, and ultimately taking responsibility for her life. This talk will help audiences learn to love, nurture, and accept themselves so they can become the people they most want to be. Tara will also show listeners how to build self-care rituals for their mind, body, and relationships which will leave them free to live the life they've always imagined.
Comedy executive Tara Schuster inspires us to build lives we love & helps lift up others
Sharp-witted, coolly confident, and disarmingly funny Comedy Central executive TARA SCHUSTER is the best friend you want in your life to help you see the truth, make you laugh through the tears, and keep it real. Tara was at the height of an ascendant career when she realized she needed a reset, and also needed to deal with intense residual aftershocks from a chaotic, neglected childhood. She put her wit and wisdom to paper, and the result is her #1 Amazon best seller Buy Yourself the F-king Lilies: And Other Rituals to Fix Your Life, from Someone Who’s Been There - equal parts self-help, inspiration and humor which keeps readers laughing as they heal. Tara has won the attention of audiences – as well as Forbes, Goop, and Cosmopolitan, among others - for her laugh-out-loud insights, wry advice and accessible practices to cultivate the lives we want.
Tara’s accomplished career as an entertainment executive started with an internship for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, who offered her the life-changing career advice she still lives by today: “There are no big breaks. There are only a series of little breaks. The key is to work your hardest and do your best at every little break.” As the VP of Talent and Development at Comedy Central, Tara was a vital force in shaping opportunities for everyone from fledgling writers to established Hollywood talent such as Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele of Key & Peele. Tara’s thought leadership in the industry earned her a role on the Motion Picture & Television Fund's NextGen Board, activating her passion for giving back to the industry and bringing others along.
Tara Schuster is an author, playwright, and accomplished entertainment executive. She served as Vice President of Talent and Development at Comedy Central where she was the Executive in Charge of the Emmy® and Peabody Award-winning Key & Peele, the Emmy® Award-winning @Midnight, and Lights Out with David Spade. She developed and oversaw a diverse slate of programming including Another Period, Detroiters, and Hood Adjacent. For her work on Key & Peele, Jordan Peele remarked that Schuster is “ahead of her time...she sees the future a little bit.” Her writing has appeared in InStyle Magazine, Thrive Global, Forbes, and The New Yorker online.
In February 2020, Tara released her first book titled Buy Yourself the F*cking Lilies: and Other Rituals to Fix Your Life from Someone Who’s Been There (The Dial Press). The book debuted at #1 in New Releases in Self−Help on Amazon Kindle, is a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly, and has been covered by People Magazine, Forbes, The Hollywood Reporter, and Newsweek among others. It was a finalist for Goodread’s Best Nonfiction book of 2020 and in under a year has sold over 100,000 copies and has been translated into five languages.
The hilarious and relatable self−help memoir tells the story of Tara’s path to re−parenting herself and becoming a “ninja of self−love.” By the time Tara was in her late twenties, she was a rising TV executive who had worked for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and helped launch Key & Peele to viral superstardom. By all appearances, she had mastered being a grown−up. But beneath that veneer of success, she was a chronically anxious, self−medicating mess. No one knew that her road to adulthood had been paved with depression, anxiety, and shame, owing in large part to her minimally parented upbringing. After drunk dialing her therapist on her 25th birthday, she knew she needed a wake up call. Through simple, daily rituals, Tara transformed her mind, body, and relationships and hopes to help readers do the same. Her aim for the book is to help people create a life they truly, totally f*cking LOVE.
In her free time, Tara enjoys writing, traveling and hiking. She has been on The Motion Picture Television Fund’s NextGen board for the past four years years and produced their prestigious Reel Stories, Real Lives the past two years. She resides in Los Angeles, California.