ADVISORY GROUP
Howard Blumenthal
Howard is a Senior Scholar at the Positive Psychology Center at The University of Pennsylvania studying human progress through the eyes of young people. Best known as the creator and producer of the Peabody and Emmy Award winning PBS series, Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?, Howard Blumenthal is the author of 25 books about U.S. history, popular culture, marketing, creativity, business, time travel, and music. He has been a senior executive with several large media companies, including a dozen years as CEO of MiND: Media Independence, an innovative public media nonprofit focused on community storytelling and shared learning experiences. He has developed and produced projects for and with HBO, Nickelodeon, Food Network, History Channel, Atari, Parker Brothers, MTV, The Learning Company, General Electric, Texas Instruments, AOL, the CBC, Scholastic, and many other media and marketing partners. His popular newspaper column about technology and the future was published weekly in over 100 newspapers, distributed by The New York Times Syndicate and United Features. He travels the world to interview children and teenagers for Kids on Earth (www.kidsonearth.org). Howard often speaks to international university audiences about human progress, global responsibility, and the future of learning.
Caty Borum Chattoo
Caty Borum Chattoo is Executive Director of the Center for Media & Social Impact (CMSI), an innovation lab and research center at American University that creates, showcases and studies media designed for social change; and Assistant Professor at American University’s School of Communication in Washington, D.C. She is an award-winning documentary producer, scholar, professor and strategist working at the intersection of social change communication, documentary and entertainment storytelling. A former producer and philanthropy director with TV producer and activist Norman Lear, she also served as program officer in the Entertainment Media & Public Health Program at the Kaiser Family Foundation, senior-vice president of social impact and behavior-change communication at global agency FleishmanHillard, and fellow in civic journalism at the Philadelphia Inquirer. Her documentaries have aired in the United States and abroad. Her book about the role of mediated comedy in social change, A Comedian and An Activist Walk Into a Bar: The Serious Role of Comedy in Social Justice, with co-author Lauren Feldman, was published by University of California Press (2020). Her documentary book, Story Movements: How Documentaries Empower People and Inspire Social Change, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press (2020).
Dan Goldman
Dan Goldman is a writer, artist and activist working in graphic novels, animated TV, video games and digital media. Creator of works like critically-acclaimed works like RED LIGHT PROPERTIES, SHOOTING WAR and PRIYA’S SHAKTI, he designs works of mindful entertainment. His next graphic novel CHASING ECHOES-- which follows the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors across rural Poland in search of confiscated family land--will be released in November 2019. He lives in Los Angeles where he runs the Kinjin Story Lab with his partner Liliam.
Mauricio Mota
Mauricio Mota, recently awarded with an Innovation and Inclusion Award by the Digital Diversity Network, is founder and co-president of Wise Entertainment. Along with his wife Katie, he served as executive producer of East Los High, an award-winning drama series that earned 6 Emmy nominations during its run on Hulu for its realistic portrayal of Latino high school students. The show is the streaming platform’s longest-running original series. Mota represents the fourth generation of one of the most important Latin American storytelling legacies and has helped his mother re-shape the estate created by his grandfather, Nelson Rodrigues, who is considered the Brazilian Shakespeare. Most recently, he designed the School of Series, a TV series/IP development lab that will shape the next generation of showrunners and content creators in Brazil, and which trains 800 writers and producers a year. He sits on the boards of Scriptd (an online marketplace for screenwriters), Young Storytellers (a non-profit focused on mentoring low-income students through storytelling), and Center for Third Space at the Annenberg School (an institute focused on shaping the next generation of business leaders). Mauricio also has spoken for national and international audiences including the White House Fellowship, the State Department, and the World Bank.
Ann Pendleton-Jullian
Ann Pendleton-Jullian is an architect, writer, and educator whose work explores the interchange between culture, environment, and technology. From a first short career in astrophysics, Professor Pendleton-Jullian has come to see the world through a lens of complexity framed by principles from ecology theory. This, in tandem with a belief that design has the power to take on the complex challenges associated with an emergent highly networked global culture has led her to work on architecture projects that range in scale and scope from things to systems of action - from a house for the astronomer Carl Sagan, to a seven village ecosystem for craft-based tourism in Guizhou province, China - and in domains outside of architecture including patient centered health, new innovation models for K-12 and higher ed, and human and economic development in marginalized populations. Prior to the Knowlton School she was a tenured professor at MIT for fourteen years. She is also a core member of a cross-disciplinary network of global leaders established by the Secretary of Defense to examine questions of emerging interest. As a writer, she has most recently finished a manuscript Design Unbound, with co-author John Seely Brown, that presents a new tool set for designing within complex systems and on complex problems endemic to the 21st century.
Lissa Soep
Lissa Soep is Executive Producer for Journalism and directs the Innovation Lab at YR Media (formerly Youth Radio), the Oakland-based national network for next-generation news and arts. Her projects with youth have won two Peabodys, five Murrows and the Robert F. Kennedy Award among other honors. With a PhD from Stanford, Lissa has written for academic journals, popular outlets and books including Youthscapes (with Maira, UPenn Press), Drop that Knowledge (with Chávez, UC Press) and Participatory Politics (MIT Press). With Asha Richardson, she founded YR’s Innovation Lab, a partnership with MIT that was among the first community-based programs in the US to teach teens to code and the first embedded in a newsroom. Her work as a writer, producer and editor has been featured on NPR, The Atlantic/CityLab and Teen Vogue. She was a part of the MacArthur Foundation’s Youth and Participatory Politics Research Network and for more than ten years served on the board of the nation’s premier youth poetry organization, Youth Speaks.
Magalis Videaux
Magalis Videaux's work lives at the intersection of experience design, immersive storytelling and experiential learning. She creates projects and cultivates spaces that harness story, design, and technology as tools for critical play and social dreaming. She is a Designer-in-Residence at the Critical Design and Gaming School in South Central Los Angeles where she is building out an experiential learning model and programmable play-space a.k.a. the Imagination Lab (ImL). Videaux is a Member of the Digital Storytelling Lab at Columbia University.