Alan Gershenfeld

Alan Gershenfeld

President and Co-Founder of E-Line Media
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Brief Biography

Alan has spent the last 30 years at the intersection of entertainment, technology and social entrepreneurship. He is currently President and Co-Founder of E-Line Media, a publisher of digital entertainment that engages, educates and empowers—with a core focus on computer/video games. Alan has worked on impact game projects with the Gates Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation, National Science Foundation, USAID, DARPA, White House OSTP, BBC, Cook Inlet Tribal Council, Games for Change, Google, Sesame Workshop, MIT Center for Bits and Atoms, ASU and other organizations.

E-Line Media’s games include the BAFTA and Peabody winning Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna), developed in partnership with the Cook Inlet Tribal Council to share, celebrate and extend Alaska Native culture through a commercial video game. The game has been downloaded over 12 million times, selected for over 75 "Best of Year” game lists and has been featured in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian. Other E-Line games include Beyond Blue—developed in partnership with BBC Blue Planet 2—Gamestar Mechanic and MinecraftEdu.

Prior to E-Line, Alan was Chairman of the nonprofit Games for Change and SVP Activision Studios, where he oversaw titles such as Civilization: Call to Power, Muppet Treasure Island, Spycraft, Pitfall, Zork and Tony Hawk Skateboarding. Before Activision, Alan spent nearly 10 years in the film industry, where he worked in development, production and post-production roles on numerous feature films and documentaries.

Alan has published articles and books on technology, media and social impact in EdSurge, Scientific American, Education Week, Huffington Post, Slate, Politico, Marketwatch, MIT Sloan Management Review, Creative Nonfiction and Knowledge Quest. He is co-author of Designing Reality: How to Survive and Thrive in the 3rd Digital Revolution.

Alan serves on the Board of Impact Guild and FilmAid International and has served on advisory boards for iCivics, PBS New Media and Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. He is former Chairman of Games for Change, Co-Founder of Experimental Design, a leading world building design agency and a Co-Founder of Endless Studios, a distributed, global youth-led game studio.

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