Tiffany Shlain

Tiffany Shlain is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker, speaker, bestselling author, and founder of The Webby Awards. She has received over 80 awards and distinctions for her films and work, including selection for the Albert Einstein Foundation’s initiative Genius: 100 Visions for the Future, being on NPR’s list of Best Commencement Speeches, and being named by Newsweek as “one of the women shaping the 21st century.” She is the recipient of 2021 Creating The Future Award from the Maui Film Festival. The Museum of Modern Art in New York premiered her live one-woman "Spoken Cinema" show, Dear Human, right before the pandemic.

Tiffany's book 24/6: The Power of Unplugging One Day a Week was published by Simon & Schuster’s Gallery Books and has been featured in the New York Times, Harvard Business Review, and the Washington Post. 24/6 received The Marshall McLuhan Outstanding Book Award, a starred review from Publisher's Weekly, and was included on bestseller lists including Best Business Books, Top Tech Books, and the Library Journal national bestseller list, and Best High Tech Audio Books. 24/6 explores her family’s decade-long, transformative practice of turning off screens one day each week for what they call their Technology Shabbats; the past, present, and future of technology; and the effects our 24/7 world has on individuals, our relationships, and our society.

The Sundance Film Festival has premiered four of her films, including her acclaimed feature documentary Connected: An Autobiography 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 selected four of Shlain’s films, including Connected, to represent the US at embassies around the world for their American Film Showcase. She serves as a film expert for selected envoys.

Tiffany’s film 50/50: Rethinking the Past, Present, and Future of Women + Power premiered live at TEDWomen, at 275 TEDx’s globally, and on Refinery29. It was the centerpiece film for the first annual 50/50 Day which had over 11,000 screenings around the globe, all linked together in an online discussion about what it’s going to take to get to a more gender-balanced world. Her films and art installations have been shown at museums, including MoMA NYC and the Leonardo da Vinci Museum. 

Tiffany’s original series, The Future Starts Here, was nominated for an Emmy Award 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, deep scientific research, 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 given keynotes at Google, Harvard, and NASA, and she was the closing speaker for TEDWomen and TEDMED. Tiffany was the on-air Internet expert on ABC’s Good Morning America with Diane Sawyer in the early days of the web, is a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute, and was invited to advise then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about the Internet and technology. She currently serves on the Leadership Board of The Digital Wellness Lab at Harvard’s Boston Children’s Hospital. 

She has contributed articles to Harvard Business Review and CNN Documentary Magazine. TED Conferences published a TEDBook based on one of her films, Brain Power: From Neurons to Networks, and she has been writing a quarterly newsletter about ideas and culture since 1998 called Breakfast @ Tiffany’s. Tiffany runs the Let it Ripple Studio, where they make films and create global days around subjects shaping our lives. Their global initiative Character Day features films on character development (including her films The Science of Character, The Making of a Mensch, and The Adaptable Mind) and brought together over 200,000 groups in 125 countries and all 50 states. She is also co-founder of 50/50 Day, Character Day, and the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences. 

Her films have been translated into multiple languages and had over 50 million views. She lives in Northern California with her husband and collaborator Ken Goldberg (an artist & professor of robotics at UC Berkeley) and their two daughters, Odessa & Blooma.