In an industry built around risk, precision and split-second decisions, stuntwomen Olivia Summers and Dee Bryant know that courage is not simply the willingness to perform a dangerous stunt. Sometimes it means demanding to be seen, trusted and hired in a profession where women have often been treated as exceptions rather than experts.
Together, Summers and Bryant founded the Association of Women Drivers, a professional stunt-driving team created to raise the visibility of highly trained female drivers and give production companies a reliable alternative to the male-dominated referral networks that have long shaped the business.
Their partnership is rooted in a shared frustration: Talented women were available, but the people making hiring decisions did not always know where to find them or did not think to look for them at all.
Summers remembers meeting with a producer who told her he had not realized there were professional female stunt drivers.
“We just put a guy in a wig,” he told her.
The comment was more than dismissive. It exposed a system in which women were frequently denied opportunities before they could even demonstrate their abilities. Producers and agencies often asked male drivers to recommend women for jobs. According to Summers and Bryant, those recommendations sometimes went to wives, girlfriends or friends who lacked the necessary professional training.
When an inexperienced woman struggled, the failure was often used as evidence that women, as a group, were not capable drivers.
“Nobody cared if they screwed up,” Summers said. “If they didn’t do a good job, nobody treated it as one person being unqualified. It became, ‘See, I told you there were no good female drivers.’”
For women who had spent years training, the consequences were significant. They were not only competing for work; they were battling assumptions created by people who had never been properly qualified for the job.
For Summers, it was a wake-up call. Frustrated and defeated by the industry, and still grieving the recent loss of her father, she found herself questioning whether she had chosen the wrong career. Sitting in her car, she looked upward and asked him for help.
When she put the key in the ignition, the answer came to her: Start an all-female stunt-driving team.
She called Bryant from the car.
“If I started an all-female stunt-driving team, would you be a part of it?” Summers asked.
Bryant’s response was immediate: “Fuck yeah.”
The Association of Women Drivers grew from that moment. Its purpose was not to exclude men or position women as novelties. It was to make highly trained female drivers visible, accessible and accountable, ensuring that when a production needed a woman who could handle a car, motorcycle, bus, big rig, boat or specialized vehicle, the answer would no longer depend solely on a man’s personal contacts.
Summers and Bryant do not describe their work as a competition with male stunt performers. Both speak warmly about the men who have supported them, hired them and celebrated the creation of the group.
But support does not eliminate the double standard.
“If we mess up, the first thing coming out of their mouths is, ‘We should have hired a guy,’” Summers said. “You’ll never hear that if a guy messes up.”
That pressure has pushed both women to expand their skills and credentials. Summers specializes in vehicles and performance driving. She and Bryant pursued commercial driver’s licenses, and Summers earned a passenger endorsement allowing her to drive buses carrying people during a scene. Bryant’s range extends across motorcycles, boats, buses, big rigs and heavy construction equipment.
They believe female drivers often have to be better prepared because they are rarely granted the luxury of an ordinary mistake.
Summers traces her resilience to her parents. Her father left school in the sixth grade to help support his family and later built a business. Her mother, who came from India by way of England and Canada, left school in the eighth grade and worked to help her own family.
Growing up in Canada, her father treated her with the same expectations he placed on her brothers, teaching her to be independent and warning her not to allow anyone to take advantage of her. Her mother, who worked in fashion and helped launch Calvin Klein’s Obsession fragrance in Canada, gave her an equally strong model of femininity and professional ambition.
Her early feature work included Transformers and one of the Ocean’s films. In commercials, she doubled the Lincoln Mercury spokesperson and performed a precision slide across the camera’s frame, an exacting maneuver that became one of her first major commercial driving stunts.
Bryant’s path into the industry began early. She remembers being the child who persuaded her friends to jump from a roof with an umbrella because she believed they might float like Mary Poppins.
Before entering the stunt business, Bryant rode motorcycles with a women’s club. One day, a stunt coordinator and second-unit director saw her riding and told her there was no other woman in the Screen Actors Guild who looked like her and could handle a motorcycle with the same skill.
He hired her to double the late singer and actress Aaliyah in a music video, and went on to double actresses including Jada Pinkett Smith and Regina King. King repeatedly requested Bryant, and the two developed a close professional relationship over years of work.
Bryant brought another uncommon qualification to stunt work: a background in heavy construction. Before entering film and television, she completed a three-year apprenticeship operating bulldozers, backhoes, cranes, earthmovers and other machinery.
To pass the time on construction sites, she raced the men operating massive scrapers. Bryant learned that by accelerating the rear engine behind a water truck, she could drift the earthmover, move ahead of the other operators and complete more loads before lunch.
That same combination of instinct, technical understanding and competitive focus became central to her work as a stunt performer.
Although Summers and Bryant share a philosophy, they bring different strengths to their partnership. Summers has extensive knowledge of commercials, agency relationships, publicity and the business details that determine how performers should be classified and compensated. Bryant’s experience is especially deep in television and film, where she has spent years building relationships with coordinators, directors and performers.
Bryant describes them as yin and yang, although the roles can shift depending on the project.
She recalled coordinating a Nike commercial featuring athletes including LeBron James and Serena Williams. The original plan called for several precision drivers to travel in a straight line while an athlete ran behind the vehicles. When the concept changed and paint was poured across the windshields, severely limiting the drivers’ visibility, Summers immediately recognized that the work had crossed into stunt territory.
She advised Bryant that the drivers’ contracts and compensation needed to change to reflect the increased danger. As a result, the performers received residuals they otherwise would not have been paid.
“Olivia basically schooled me on that,” Bryant said.
Bryant brings the same authority to projects involving complex vehicles and large-scale action. Near the end of their conversation, Summers highlighted a Ford World Cup campaign in which Bryant coordinated truck work and drove while towing a boat through the busy streets of Austin. Summers viewed the commercial as an important example of a woman managing demanding vehicle action on a major campaign, work that audiences may see without realizing who planned or performed it.
Bryant also pointed to a high-speed boat chase she performed while doubling Kerry Washington. The sequence earned her multiple award nominations. During the chase, another boat lost control and launched over Bryant’s head. The moment was captured practically rather than created with computer-generated imagery, and a still photograph shows Bryant operating the boat as the second vessel flies above her.
Those achievements demonstrate why Summers and Bryant are determined to make experienced women easier to hire. The Association of Women Drivers is not a traditional membership organization. Rather than expanding for the sake of numbers, the founders use their reputations and industry relationships to recommend women they have personally vetted.
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When Bryant was hired to perform a bus rollover for the television series Paradise, she was not available to complete the driving sequences leading up to the crash. She recommended another African American female driver whom she knew could safely and professionally execute the work.
That kind of referral is central to the association’s mission. Summers and Bryant are not simply seeking more jobs for themselves. They are trying to build a structure that allows qualified women to be considered based on demonstrated ability instead of proximity to an established male performer.
For Summers, the goal is for women to feel safe on set, not only physically, but mentally.
“I want women to know they belong,” she said. “I want them to feel like they don’t have to prove themselves, that their talent should just do it for them. I want them not to feel like everybody’s staring at them, waiting for them to make a mistake.”
Bryant wants the next generation to understand its own power, worth and value.
“Don’t just learn how to ride a motorcycle,” Bryant said. “Learn how to drive a boat. Learn how to drive a big rig. Learn how to drive a bus. Broaden your horizons. The more feathers in your cap, the more marketable you are.”
Their work continues to expand well beyond the projects that brought them together. Summers recently served as stunt coordinator on Ford’s Ready Set Ford campaign and as the lead big-rig driver on Apple TV’s Pluribus, while also taking on driving and acting roles in Lanterns and an upcoming Lexus campaign.
Bryant recently performed high-action driving while doubling Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor in Apple TV’s Lucky and earned two 2026 Taurus World Stunt Award nominations for the boat-chase sequence in Shadow Force, including Best Overall Stunt by a Stunt Woman.
Summers and Bryant have spent their careers proving that women can take the wheel.
To learn more, visit associationofwomendrivers.com or follow @awd_drivers, @msoliviasummers and @lilfallgirl on Instagram.
Amy Pais-Richer is a published author, screenwriter, and former advertising creative director.
