Johanna Blakley

MANAGING DIRECTOR, THE NORMAN LEAR CENTER

Johanna Blakley, PhD, is the managing director at the Norman Lear Center. Johanna performs research on a wide variety of topics, including media impact, global entertainment, cultural diplomacy, disinformation, celebrity culture, fashion, digital media and intellectual property law. She has two talks on TED.com: Social Media & the End of Gender and Lessons from Fashion’s Free Culture. She speaks frequently in the U.S. and abroad about her research and her work has been cited by Reuters, the New York Times, The Economist, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, Politico, HuffPost, RAND, Forbes, Business Week and PR Week. She has appeared on Good Morning America, MSNBC and Al Jazeera, and on several radio programs, including Freakonomics, On the Media, Planet Money, Marketplace, BBC Radio and the TED Radio Hour.

With Marty Kaplan, Johanna co-founded the Media Impact Project (MIP), a hub for collecting, developing and sharing approaches for measuring the impact of media, whose launch was primarily funded by the Gates Foundation. MIP seeks to better understand the role that media plays in changing knowledge, attitudes and behavior among individuals and communities around the world. Recent MIP work includes analyzing depictions of Africa, immigration, race, economic mobility and climate change in US media. MIP has also worked with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Open Society Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Walton Foundation, World Bank, the National Institute of Health and the US State Department, including its American Film Showcase program and the Middle East Media Initiative.

Much of her work addresses the intersection between entertainment and politics, including a report on the Primetime War on Drugs & Terror, three nationwide polls on the relationship between political ideology and entertainment preferences, and research on how disinformation campaigns utilize features of entertainment for increased engagement and influence.

Johanna has guided more than forty manuscripts through the publication process at the Lear Center, including Warners’ War: Propaganda, Politics & Pop Culture in Wartime Hollywood. She has also overseen two major research initiatives about the impact of intellectual property rights on innovation and creativity – Ready to Share: Fashion & the Ownership of Creativity and Artists, Technology & the Ownership of Creative Content. At USC, she co-directed a university-wide research initiative on Creativity & Collaboration in the Academy; she developed course materials on cultural diplomacy for the Masters in Public Diplomacy program at Annenberg, and she created and taught masters courses on multiplatform storytelling for professional writers.

She received a PhD in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she taught courses on popular culture and twentieth-century literature. Johanna has held a variety of positions within the high-tech industry, including Web producer and digital archivist at Vivendi-Universal Games. She has served as an advisor to the Aspen Institute, the Paley Center for Media, the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities and TEDxUSC, the first TEDx event in the world. She’s on the editorial board of the International Journal of Gender, Science and Technology and she’s served on the boards of Punctum Books and Les Figues Press.

Contact Johanna here.