Mina Hsiang was the third Administrator of the United States Digital Service (USDS), a role she served in from August 2021 to January 2025. As USDS Administrator she led the organization within the Executive Office of the President charged with tackling government’s most critical technology challenges to deliver simpler, more secure, and more efficient government […]
Kira Pollack is a leading creative director and photo editor known for pioneering new approaches to visual storytelling. Throughout her career, she has redefined how photography, emerging technology, and digital media intersect to expand the possibilities of visual journalism. Pollack was Creative Director and Deputy Editor at Vanity Fair, where she oversaw more than 50
Sarafina DiFelice is a documentary producer, creative executive, and curator. She was previously on the Netflix Original Documentaries team where she oversaw global non-fiction acquisitions, as well as a commissioned slate of celebrated and award-winning documentary feature films. Prior to this, Sarafina spent over a decade as a curator at some of the world’s largest film festivals, including roles
Shirley Abraham is a Cannes prize-winning Indian documentary filmmaker. As a child, she came to the movies by rebellion. She watched them in secret—covering the television screen with a cloth, making her own magical cave. The Cinema Travellers, her debut film made in collaboration with Amit Madheshiya, premiered as an Official Selection at Cannes Film
Christian L. Tom most recently served as Assistant to the President and Director of Digital Strategy in the Biden White House. He has previously worked across the business, academic, and political aspects of the digital media landscape in a variety of roles and capacities. Before the White House, he led the first-of-its-kind Digital Partnerships team
Gabriel Stein is a technologist, developer, and writer who has been interested in the intersection of culture and technology since he taught himself to code in middle school to build an online roleplaying game. He is the Head of Platform at Knowledge Futures, a non-profit that builds public digital infrastructure to make information useful. He
V Spehar is an award-winning digital journalist, TikTok personality and podcaster. Spehar launched UnderTheDeskNews with the aim to make news media less intimidating and easier to understand and rapidly amassed a collective 4 million subscribers to their various social media platforms. Their original reporting has won them one on one interviews with Vice President Kamala
Ravi Gupta is the Founder and CEO of The Branch, a non-profit media company that launched in October 2021 to fight polarization and misinformation online. Before launching The Branch, Gupta co-founded Arena, where he led a team that helped elect dozens of candidates and launched the largest campaign staffer training academy in the history of
Shuwei Fang is Associate Director, Programs at Open Society Foundations where she has spent over a decade advancing civic media and information technology via grants and hybrid investments. At Open Society, she recently led the AI in Journalism Futures project, one of the first significant global attempts to understand how the long-term impact of AI
Felipe Estefan has dedicated his career to the intersection of democracy, media and technology. Currently, his work focuses on narrative change as a path to promoting mutual understanding, fostering belonging, and reimagining democracy in a digital age. For the past decade, Estefan was part of Luminate – a global philanthropic organization – where he most
Tracy Chou is an entrepreneur and software engineer well-known for her work advocating for diversity and inclusion in tech. Motivated by personal experience in countering online harassment, and drawing on professional experience as an early engineer at social media companies like Facebook, Pinterest, and Quora, she founded the tech startup Block Party to build end-user
Leisel Bogan is a technology, international, and national security leader with experience in the private, public, and academic sectors. As a Senior Technical Advisor at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Bogan focused on safeguarding critical infrastructure and defending against nation-state cyber threats. Prior to CISA, Bogan was a Research Fellow at the Harvard
Louis Barclay is a software developer and tech activist who was banned and legally threatened by Meta in 2021 for creating Unfollow Everything, a tool to delete users’ news feeds, leading to a major lawsuit last year. Barclay is also the founder of Nudge, an open source project to give people more control over what
Rodas is a recent MC/MPA graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School. Her previous training and work include architecture, planning, and business. Rodas has the resilience, enthusiasm, and ability to be the beacon of hope for her fellow classmates, colleagues, and citizens of the world. In her role at the Shorenstein Center as a resident fellow,
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Alex Smith founded The Cares Family and was CEO from 2011 until 2023. Under his leadership, the organization brought together 30,000 older and younger people to reduce loneliness and attitudinal polarization and to build solidarity across generations in times of change. Through this role, Smith helped shape the world’s first government-level loneliness strategy which was
Megan Smith is an award-winning entrepreneur, engineer, and tech evangelist – currently CEO & Founder shift7, board member of the MIT, Vital Voices, LA28 Olympics, Thinkof-Us, PlanetRead, Algorithmic Justice League, and Earth Conservation Corp. Smith served as the third U.S. chief technology officer (U.S. CTO) and Assistant to the President from 2014-2017 under President Obama
Mark MacGann has thirty years’ experience at the nexus of business and government, having served in global senior executive and management roles for some of the world’s most successful corporations (Uber, NYSE, VEON, Nokia). Until recently, he served as a United Nations Commissioner for Sustainable Development. In early 2022, he embarked on a life-changing journey
Taylor Holden is the CEO of One for Democracy, a funding network that invests in election excellence, voter empowerment, and civil society. As a longtime organizer and strategist, Holden has spent most of her career working behind the scenes to radically resource community leaders and candidates who provide aid, inspire civic engagement, and shift policy
Abby Sun is the Director of Artist Programs and Editor of Documentary Magazine at the International Documentary Association (IDA). Most recently, she was a 2022 Warhol Foundation Curatorial Research Fellow and the Curator of the DocYard. As a graduate researcher in the MIT Open Documentary Lab, she edited Immerse from 2020-2022. With Keisha Knight, Abby co-curated My Sight is
Bernardo Ruiz is a three-time Emmy®-nominated documentary filmmaker and member of the Documentary Branch of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. For more than two and a half decades, he has worked in the documentary field—primarily as a director and producer, but simultaneously as an organizer, mentor, and panelist. Ruiz was an active steering
The Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy is a Harvard Kennedy School research center dedicated to exploring and illuminating the intersection of press, politics and public policy in theory and practice. The Center strives to bridge the gap between journalists and scholars, and between them and the public.
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