Amplified Promotes Its First Assistant Class to Manager
Talent management company Amplified has promoted assistants Kris Chesnokova and Christina Wachter to manager, making them the first internal assistant class the firm has ever elevated to the role.
According to Amplified's partners, no previous assistant at the company had moved up to manager before this pair. That detail matters in an industry where the assistant-to-agent or assistant-to-manager pipeline is a well-trodden path — but one that each company structures on its own timeline.
Chesnokova was born in Uzbekistan and immigrated to the United States at the age of four. She began her career at Riot Games, the Los Angeles-based game developer best known for League of Legends, before moving into talent management at Amplified.
Wachter took a more traditional route into the business. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin and started out at IAG, the talent and literary agency, working in its Scripted Literary and Media Rights departments. In those roles, she would have handled the business side of writers' deals — shepherding book and script projects through the contracting and rights-clearance process before they reach a studio or platform.
At Amplified, Wachter now represents a roster of writers that includes Andrina Wekontash Smith, Isabel E., May Darmon, Katie Avery, and Patrick Emralino. A talent manager, in this context, is the person who guides a writer's career across projects — finding opportunities, negotiating deals, and shaping long-term strategy — rather than booking individual jobs, which is the agent's domain.
Both promotions were announced on 14 August 2026, as reported by Deadline.
For a company to promote its first assistants to manager is a milestone in the small-but-growing-firm sense: it signals that Amplified has been around long enough, and with enough client volume, to need more managers on its roster. The two new managers step into roles where they will build their own client lists alongside the firm's existing partners.
