About Alicia

Alicia Read is an American-Canadian actor, producer, entrepreneur and industry executive working at the intersection of entertainment, storytelling and brand building. Her screen work has reached more than 500 million viewers across traditional film and television, as well as leading vertical microdrama platforms.

Born on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Alicia began performing as a child co-star in Foufouli, a Canadian television series written, produced and starring her mother. After graduating from theatre school in 1999, she joined John Juliani’s Savage Gods: The Shakespeare Project, grounding her early work in classical text, ensemble practice and rigorous character development.

After becoming a mother, Alicia stepped away from acting to raise her daughter as a single parent and spent the next two decades building businesses and brands. She founded a distribution company and later Kalosophie, a branding, sales, marketing and public relations agency, before moving into C-suite leadership within the beauty industry. Known for an instinctive understanding of trends, positioning and consumer behaviour, she helped independent brands grow from emerging concepts into internationally distributed businesses, securing prestige media coverage in publications including Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and retail partnerships with goop, Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom and Holt Renfrew. Her work spanned product development, sales, communications, marketing, operations and international expansion.

During the pandemic, Alicia expanded into audio storytelling, creating and distributing two podcast series; her first reached Apple’s Top 100 Self-Help Podcasts during its launch week. She is also certified in Hatha Yoga, Pilates and Clinical Counselling — disciplines that have further informed her understanding of human behaviour, communication and character.

Alicia returned to acting in 2022 and quickly built a substantial body of screen work while expanding into production, development and industry leadership. Based in Los Angeles, Alicia is co-founder of Women in Vertical Media, a first-of-its-kind industry initiative bringing together senior female executives and leaders shaping the future of vertical entertainment. She also serves as Executive Partner at Type Eh Media and co-founded the Vertical Film & Short Series Alliance (VFSSA), the first global professional alliance dedicated to advancing standards, visibility and long-term opportunity across the vertical entertainment ecosystem.

Today, Alicia brings together the many strands of her career — performer, producer, strategist and entrepreneur — with a growing focus on developing and producing original entertainment, building meaningful partnerships between brands and storytelling, and helping shape the future of a format that is changing how audiences around the world consume narrative content.