These alums started Pipe Dream production company to share untold stories
Margaret Montavon and Elizabeth Raia are co-founders of Pipe Dream, a film, television and theater production company. Their mission is to tell underrepresented and overlooked stories.
Criticism may make some people crumble. But Margaret Montavon and Elizabeth Raia, co-founders of New York-based production company Pipe Dream, are driven by it.
It’s evidenced by the big, red “B-” printed prominently at the top of the company’s notepads, serving as a reminder to when Montavon and Raia were told they were doing “B- work” as producers in their early days.
The name of the company itself was taken from a blunt comment from a “well-meaning” industry-connected friend, who said the company’s mission to tell stories about underrepresented and overlooked groups was a “pipe dream.”
“If you don’t have something to reach for, then you’re selling yourself short,” Raia told Northeastern Global News. “Everyone should have a pipe dream.”
That pipe dream has turned into a full blown production company for film, television and, more recently, for the stage, sharing poignant stories about living in one’s truth to a darkly comedic retelling of a historic event.
This August, Montavon and Raia received Women Who Empower Innovator Awards for their work through Pipe Dream. The awards are given to Northeastern University students, alumni and associates pursuing ventures across AI, technology, health, arts and more.
Montavon and Raia said the mission of Women Who Empower aligns with their own. They felt honored to have received the award.
The honor has already inspired partnerships with fellow Northeastern alum to develop a mental health cooking show and a business plan to fund their own self-created projects, the duo said.
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The pair met as 18-year-old freshmen at Marymount Manhattan College, now Northeastern University New York City. Raia sought to dance professionally while studying communications, while Montavon pursued a degree in theater production.
After a class called “Emerging Leaders,” Raia asked Montavon to grab coffee — an outing that would last three hours. It quickly became a “chosen sisterhood,” Montavon said. Three months later, they would move into a tiny first-floor, two-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side.
Graduating in 2012, Montavon pursued acting and later would earn a master’s degree in education from Northeastern and become a musical theater teacher. Raia, who graduated a year later, worked in production for the likes of The Colbert Report, ABC and the PGA.
Through it all, the pair held countless jobs — courier, babysitter, cater-waiter, front desk receptionist, guest-greeter for short-term rentals, to name a few — to keep the dream alive.
“It was in that wiggly, windy journey that we found ourselves getting frustrated,” Montavon said, adding that they and many colleagues found the work full of gatekeepers.
“What was being offered for, frankly, women, at the time opportunity-wise was not something that we were interested in either working behind the scenes or in front of the camera for,” Montavon said.
Then a crucial conversation happened on Montavon’s couch in 2019. Raia wrote a multi-genre scripted series about “bold women who dared to defy the status quo” called “Disruptor.”
Rather than wait for permission to make the series, Raia proposed that she and Montavon partner to do it themselves through the creation of their own production company, which was officially incorporated in 2022.
Ultimately, it was the pair’s deep friendship and shared frustration with the male-centric nature of the entertainment industry that was the impetus for Pipe Dream.
“There, at the time, weren’t roles for women that were as complex as we were feeling in our own lives that were truly representative of the female experience,” Raia said. “So we wanted to be a part of putting content out there that was an actual representation of the female experience, but also underrepresented folks as well.”
“Disruptor” would later be shopped to major streamers with Priyanka Chopra Jonas and her company. While it didn’t land, it “opened a lot of doors for us professionally,” Raia said.
Writer and performer TJ Pieffer worked with Pipe Dream on a mockumentary play called “Prairie Park” about a struggling theme park in Tampa, Florida and an upcoming musical comedy called “Salem,” based on the Salem Witch Trials. He said working as a writer with Montavon and Raia was “my pipe dream.”
“Getting the chance to work with such collaborative, open and organized producers, knowing you can rest easy because your work is in good hands, that is the true holy grail for an artist,” Pieffer said. “Margaret and Elizabeth are not only committed to seeing their projects to fruition but are intent on only working with people that lead with kindness.”
Leading with positivity and warmth is particularly important to them.
“We’re very in tune with energy and we say, ‘What can I get you right now? What do you need?’ Even if it’s a coffee or a five-minute break or something,” Raia said. “The feedback we’ve gotten is that they’ve never felt more taken care of during the creative process, which really allowed them to get to do the best work.”
They’re proud of all of the projects they’ve made – including “Chicken,” their first international short film shot in Cape Town, South Africa, and produced remotely, and “King of Pangea,” their first theater production that debuted in London in 2025.
A project that passes through Pipe Dream “aims to educate without being preachy, to inspire without being saccharine and to provide catharsis in a world with some heart and humor when it very desperately seems to need it,” Montavon said.
But one project in particular stood out between the both of them called “When We Arrive as Flowers.” It’s a short experimental film that uses the metaphor of a seed growing in a garden to explore the transition story of dancer and poet Diovanna Óbàfunmílayo.
Shown at 19 film festivals, the welcome response to the production, even by “folks across the political spectrum, Raia said, underscored why Pipe Dream does this work.
“It’s hard when you’re asking someone to have some belief in something,” Montavon said. “There’s so much you have to take on with a leap of faith, and then to see all of it come to fruition, be it on screen or on stage and to look at each other and say, ‘Hey, that was worth it,’ that’s the pipe dream, if you will.”
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