Tiffany Shlain

Emmy-nominated filmmaker and Founder, Webby Awards

About This Expert

Emmy-nominated filmmaker and Webby Awards Founder Tiffany Shlain has received over 65 awards and distinctions for her films and work, including being named by NPR as having delivered one of the Best Commencement Speeches, Ever, and by Newsweek as “one of the women shaping the 21st Century.”

She has premiered four films at Sundance, including her acclaimed feature documentary Connected: An Autoblogography about Love, Death & Technology, which The New York Times hailed as “high-tech Terry Gilliam,” and “Examining Everything From the Big Bang to Twitter.” The US State Department has also selected three of Shlain’s films including Connected to represent the U.S. at embassies around the world for their American Film Showcase. Her AOL Original series, The Future Starts Here was nominated for an Emmy in New Approaches: Arts, Lifestyle, Culture and has over 40 million views to date. Shlain’s films employ her signature style of fast-paced images, colorful animations, and daring and funny insights to encourage us all to think about where we’re headed in our increasingly connected world.

Tiffany is a world-renowned speaker and has been featured at institutions including Google, Harvard, NASA, and Fortune 500 companies. Tiffany was the on-air Internet expert on ABC’s Good Morning America with Diane Sawyer, is a Henry Crown Fellow of The Aspen Institute, is an advisor to The Institute for the Future, and was invited to advise then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about the Internet and technology.

She has contributed articles for Harvard Business Review, Documentary Magazine and was listed byIndiewire & FastCompany for her writing on twitter. TED Conferences published her first book, Brain Power: From Neurons to Networks, which premiered simultaneously with the accompanying 10 min film and has been writing a quarterly newsletter called Breakfast @ Tiffany’s since 1998. She runs an independent film studio + lab in San Francisco called The Moxie Institute.

Tiffany lives in Northern California with her husband and collaborator Ken Goldberg and their two children. Her films and work often wrestle with the good, the bad and the potential of technology. She and her family are on their 5th year unplugging each week for 24 hours as part of their “technology shabbats,” which she has written about, given talks about and explores in many of her films.