Meet the Team

An actress, singer, voiceover artist, director, producer, writer, and storyteller, Maria Lee is the founder of It Has Pockets! Productions, a company born from a simple conviction: women shouldn’t have to choose between a full life and a creative one.

A proud member of SAG-AFTRA and Actors’ Equity Association, Maria has spent most of her life in the arts. She earned her B.A. in Theatre from Florida State University and went on to work professionally in theatre, film, voiceover, recording, and live entertainment. Then came marriage and motherhood.

Like so many women, Maria discovered that the years spent raising a family didn’t erase the artist she had been—but they did change her. Stepping away from the traditional trajectory of a performing career gave her a front-row seat to the enormous amount of creative, emotional, logistical, and often invisible work women carry.

It also left her wondering why returning to meaningful creative work so often seems to require women to pretend those other parts of their lives don’t exist. She asked if it was possible to build a new creative ecosystem that works for the lives of women, especially moms, who were ready to take their artistic dreams off the shelf, in a way that honors all that they still have to carry on the homefront.

It Has Pockets! Productions grew out of that question.

Maria founded the company to create film, theatre, and media projects with and for women—especially women navigating creativity alongside motherhood, family, caregiving, and the beautifully complicated realities of this season of life. Rather than asking people to build their lives around the work, It Has Pockets! is interested in finding better ways to build the work around human lives.

Maria’s goal isn’t to build a company that asks women to carry more.

It’s to build one that makes room for what they’re already carrying.