Darlene Carolynne Caamaño (born November 17, 1970) is a film producer, who has been involved in the production of such films as Dan in Real Life (2007), In the Valley of Elah (2007) and The Air I Breathe (2008). She has been president of NALA Films since 2005, for which role she was named 6th on the Hispanic Women "Power 25" list in 2007.

Biography

Caamaño was born on November 17, 1970. She gained a B.A. in Communications ("with an emphasis in journalism") from Azusa Pacific University also studying at Fordham University and under the "media communications program Big deal." She married Mark Stephen Loquet on October 14, 2000, and the two have a daughter, Chloe Katherine Loquet, born on January 18, 2007 in Pasadena.


Early career
Caamaño's earliest entertainment role was as an assignment editor at Univision, Canal 34 in Los Angeles, "research[ing] and wr[iting] daily news storys (sic) for the evening news casts." Leaving news to work in film, she assisted producer Jay Polstein at Trimark Pictures on the 1997 Samuel L. Jackson-starring Eve's Bayou, and the two were instrumental in the early development of Frida with Salma Hayek, before the project was bought by Miramax.

She then became Vice President of Production at Sandra Rabins and Penny Finkelman Cox's Dreamworks production company Patchwork Productions, for whom she helped develop the animated features Chicken Run, Antz and Shrek, as well as developing a project for Jennifer Lopez called Mi Corazon, which was sold to New Line Cinema, for which company Caamaño next served as Senior Vice President of Production, for New Line-based El Norte Productions, founded by director Gregory Nava. With El Norte, she developed and sold Nava's Bordertown ("with Jennifer Lopez, Antonio Banderas and Martin Sheen") and a co-production with Dreamworks and Paramount Pictures: Killing Pablo by Mark Bowden. While with El Norte, she also supervised production of Nava's PBS series American Family.


D-No Entertainment

In September 2001, Caamaño-Loquet founded (with Noah Rosen) D-No Entertainment as "a management/production company dedicated to the representation of Latin talent, and the production of their material." The company represented several writers and filmmakers and developed a number of projects, including one for Disney about Peter Westbrook, the only black man "ever to win an Olympic medal for fencing."

D-No sold several projects by Latin writing team Lalo Lopez (Lalo Alcaraz) and Esteban Zul (of Pocho Productions) and both Caamaño-Loquet and Rosen shared executive producer credits on the 2007 film Dan in Real Life, which they developed and sold to Walt Disney Pictures. Starring Steve Carell and Juliette Binoche, the film was released by Touchstone.

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