Tiffany Shlain

Tiffany Shlain is a filmmaker, writer, founder of the Webby Awards, and co-founder of The International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences. A celebrated thinker and catalyst, Tiffany is known for her ability to illuminate complex ideas in culture, science, technology, and life through her unique films, dynamic talks, and innovative projects. She delivered the campus-wide keynote commencement address at UCBerkeley and her films and work have received 60 awards and distinctions including a “Disruptive Innovation Award” from The Tribeca Film Festival. Her two most recent films have been invited to represent America at embassies worldwide in the US State Department’s America Film Showcase and her last four films premiered at Sundance, including her 2011 acclaimed feature documentary, Connected: An Autoblogography about Love, Death & Technology, which The New York Times hailed as “Incredibly engaging” and “Examining Everything From the Big Bang to Twitter.” She is currently working on a film series which is paving the way for a new kind of collaborative filmmaking she and her film studio call “Cloud FIlmmaking.” The series, titled Let it Ripple: Mobile Films for Global Change, will include 10 short films over the next 4 years about important aspects of life that connect us. Each of these films invites participants to send in videos from their cell phones and then after the film is completed her team makes free customized versions for non-profits all over the world. Three films have been released (A Declaration of Interdependence, Engage and Brain Power) and nearly 500 versions of the films have been made for nonprofits. These films have been volunteer-translated into 65 languages. The third film in the series Brain Power: From Neurons to Networks, is also the basis for Tiffany’s first book that the TED conference published, of the same name. Tiffany was invited to share the groundbreaking approach of her “Cloud Filmmaking” as the keynote speaker for the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival Interactive Day. She is currently also working on an original film series for AOL, “The Future Starts Here,” that will be released this fall. Tiffany is a member of the advisory board for The Prince of Wales Fellowship at MIT, MIT-IBM Network Science Research Center, The Institute for the Future and she was invited to advise Secretary State Hillary Clinton about the Internet and technology. She is a 2007 Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network.