The Civic Imagination Project

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 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 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.