Gretchen McGowan is an award-winning independent film producer. She is currently the head of production for Goldcrest Features in New York City where she oversees titles such as Carol, Restrepo, To Olivia, Back to Black and the upcoming Connesence and Mothers' Instinct.  

Gretchen has collaborated with Sebastian Junger on five films and she just completed Hell of a Cruise for Peacock/NBCUniversal, a feature documentary about the cruise industry’s handling of Covid-19.  

Gretchen independently produced Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control in Spain for Focus Features and American Swing for Magnolia Pictures. She line produced the Oscar nominated Dancemaker, Buffalo ’66, Two Girls and a Guy, American Psycho and Heavy. 

While head of production with Mark Cuban’s HDNet Films, Open City Films and Blow Up Pictures, Gretchen supervised over 25 features including Redacted, Enron, Broken English, Bubble, Lovely and Amazing and Coffee and Cigarettes. 

Gretchen's filmmaking career has taken her to Vietnam, Jordan, Germany, Spain, Costa Rica, Mexico, Canada and across the United States.

Gretchen taught filmmaking at Columbia University's graduate film school. She guest lectures for students at NYU, SVA, New York Film Academy, Stony Book and CUNY's Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema. For two years she ran the Gotham (IFP) Narrative Rough Cut Lab, she is a BAFTA member and she is now serving her second term on the board of directors of New York Women in Film and Television (NYWIFT).

Gretchen just produced Nick Quested's feature doc 64 Days, an immersive dive into the Stop The Steal movement released just before the 2024 elections, and she is an executive producer on the 2024 Critics Choice nominee Once Upon a Time in Ukraine.

Her next book, What We Drop on the Way up the Ladder, is a New York City-based historical novel, its title borrowed from Bette Davis' famous line in All About Eve.