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When Ivan Williams walked into a packed theater at South by Southwest for the world premiere of The Secret Mall Apartment, his audacious, genre-bending documentary with Jesse Eisenberg, the energy didn’t just buzz. It surged. The film’s impact was so electric that SXSW immediately added additional sold-out screenings. A rare event indeed. The film went on to become one of the highest-grossing documentaries to have premiered at SXSW, Sundance, or TIFF in the past two years.

That moment did not launch Ivan Williams.

It revealed what the UC Irvine MBA had already made possible.

From Rhode Island to San Diego to Monterey, from BP’s global refineries to Hollywood’s most influential creative rooms, and now to the front lines of artificial intelligence, Williams has become one of UC Irvine’s most powerful cross-disciplinary forces. And he is clear: none of this would have happened without the UC Irvine Executive MBA.

From Engineer’s Engineer to Relentless Rebuilder

Born into a Navy family, Williams worked as an advanced computer applications engineer at ARCO after earning his chemical engineering degree from Oregon State. “I was an engineer’s engineer,” he says. “Equations made sense. Business strategy didn’t. I had zero plans to ever leave the technical discipline.”

That changed the moment ARCO sponsored him into UC Irvine’s Executive MBA program in 1994.

“The EMBA was transformative,” Williams reflects. “It gave me the ability to see opportunities not in black and white, but in shades of gray. It rewired how I thought, it gave me the confidence and the framework to reinvent.”

He was Class No. 10, long before the Paul Merage gift, and credits faculty like Professor Vijay Gurbaxani with opening his mind to the future of digital business. A team project during the program modeled the concept behind OpenTable, five years before it existed.

That strategic fluency propelled him as ARCO was acquired by BP In 2000. There he took on a leading role as BP’s global e-procurement manager overseeing the transformation of all of BP’s refining purchase-to-pay processes. Eventually, he was named as the senior leader of all of BP’s U.S. refinery and chemical plant site procurement and contracting teams, a group that was responsible for over $6B in spend per year.

Reinventing Again, Into Hollywood

In 2010, following the BP Gulf of Mexico oil platform situation, Williams accepted an early retirement package. Instead of slowing down, he reinvented again.

“My wife looked at me and said, ‘You’re not going to lay on the beach for 20 years. What are you going to do?’ And I said, ‘We’re going into the film business.’ She said, ‘Film? What the hell do you know about that?’”

Plenty, it turned out.

From early Super 8 films in high school to decades of strategic framing, Williams had always been a producer, he just needed the right ecosystem. He went on to co-finance, produce, and executive-produce projects including:

• Knights of Badassdom (Peter Dinklage, Summer Glau, Ryan Kwanten)
• This Changes Everything (TIFF-premiered, Geena Davis executive produced film is now enshrined at the Academy Museum for its impact on gender equity in Hollywood)
• The Secret Mall Apartment, SXSW cultural phenomenon
• How to Build a Truth Engine, a SXSW premiered documentary focused on misinformation and disinformation, its impact, how we process it, and ways to deal with it.
• Köln 75, 120-second sellout at Berlinale, four German Film Academy nominations, global theatrical release

“Independent filmmaking is pure entrepreneurship,” Williams says. “Each film is an LLC. You need financing, risk management, market analysis, distribution. UC Irvine trained me for that, even though I didn’t know it at the time.”

From Filmmaker to Global Voice on Climate Justice

Williams’ work has also reached the frontlines of one of humanity’s defining battles — climate change. He produced two award-winning environmental short films, Letter From the Age of Ecocide and Heart of the Sea, both of which were selected for exhibition by the Aspen Institute Climate Summit in Miami and the United Nations’ COP28 conference in Dubai. These films were seen by world leaders, policy architects — even heads of state and royal delegations — cementing Williams not just as a storyteller, but as a strategic cultural force shaping planetary consciousness.

For Williams, climate storytelling is not activism — it is infrastructure. “If people can’t emotionally feel what’s being lost, they won’t fight to save it,” he says.

From Hollywood to AI Leadership

Today, Williams is not just telling human stories in his two film production companies, Outer Limits Productions and Wildbrush Media, but he’s fighting for truth itself.

He is the co-founder and CEO of Nexus4AI, building AI software to help combat misinformation at the source, a technology profiled in his investigative documentary How to Build a Truth Engine. A film that he produced alongside executive producers George Clooney, Grant Heslov and their Smokehouse Pictures.

He’s not merely participating in the AI revolution, he is helping architect its ethical future.

A Living Force Inside UC Irvine’s Next Era

What began with an EMBA has evolved into a multi-decade, institution-shaping partnership. Williams now serves UC Irvine not as an alum, but as an active architect of its future:

• Featured speaker, Merage School C-Suite Recoding the Future of Business Conference
• Founding member, Claire Trevor Society
• Chair, UC Irvine Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory Brain Initiative Advisory Board
• Dean’s Leadership Council, School of Humanities
• Executive Advisory Board, Honors Collegium
• Executive Advisory Board, UC Irvine Black Thriving Initiative
• Former UC Irvine Foundation trustee & the $2B Brilliant Future Campaign honorary committee member

Outside of UCI, a host of other community and business roles are also key.

Williams, who is a veteran Navy Reserve intelligence officer, is a long time member of the Producers Guild of America and active in the New York City based arts education advocacy group The Creative Coalition as a distinguished member. He also serves on the $300M Boldly Hoag Hospital campaign’s community leaders committee and sits on the boards of Apples and Oranges Arts, a theater and immersive performance company, reSpace, a proptech startup, and ScriptHop, a platform for evaluating and pitching scripts.

He is not “giving back.” He is building forward.

Lessons for Future Merage Leaders

Williams is adamant: competitive advantage now belongs to those who can lead across worlds.

“Creativity is nothing without business action. Business is nothing without cultural relevance. And neither matter if you can’t earn trust in the age of AI.”

He credits UC Irvine with giving him the mental operating system to leap industries, absorb new languages, and lead change at velocity.

The Future of Storytelling, And Why It Matters

As film, technology, and human identity collide, Williams says the next decade will define far more than the future of entertainment.

It will test our ability to preserve truth.
To protect culture and our environment.
To elevate human dignity in an automated age.

“The art of storytelling won’t change. But who controls it, and who it empowers, absolutely will.”

For Williams, the UC Irvine EMBA was the inflection point.

“It gave me the confidence to move from oil refineries to red carpets, and now into AI itself.”

Epilogue: What UC Irvine Makes Possible

Ivan Williams is not asking what the future will look like. He is already building it, across industries, across disciplines, and from the inside out. What began as an Executive MBA became the operating system for a life of reinvention. From refineries to red carpets. From cinema to cognition. From storytelling to safeguarding truth in the age of AI.

And it all started at UC Irvine, not as a credential, but as ignition. Because for leaders like Ivan Williams, UC Irvine doesn’t just open doors. It alters what a life can become.