June Cohen

Brainstormer, Change agent, Connector, Environmentalist, Explorer, Global soul, Idea generator, Producer, Technologist, Writer/Editor

June Cohen is a pioneer in media and technology, best known for her work with TED, Masters of Scale and Wired. Her contributions include launching TED Talks online and leading TED’s media organization as it grew to 1 billion views/year; co-founding (with Deron Triff) the venture-backed media company, WaitWhat, which earned more podcast industry award nominations (2018-2023) than any other media company of any size; co-creating the podcasts Masters of Scale, Meditative Story, Spark & Fire, Should This Exist?, and Sincerely, X; co-creating and co-hosting the Masters of Scale Summit; co-hosting the TED Conference with Chris Anderson; launching and co-hosting TEDWomen with Pat Mitchell; launching the TED Open Translation Project, which grew to the largest volunteer subtitling project in the world; hosting the podcasts Sincerely, X and Spark & Fire; co-creating The Possible, the world’s first documentary series in VR; being part of the team that launched HotWired.com, the pioneering website from Wired Magazine; creating Webmonkey, the beloved Web 1.0 site for web developers; leading the Stanford team that created the world’s first multimedia publication in 1991. Her work has reached hundreds of millions of people and earned 100+ industry awards and nominations, including 67 Webby honors, a National Design Award and a Peabody.

The possibility for ancient wisdom and modern science to partner in solving our great challenges. Media, technology, culture and their impact on each other. Creativity and collaboration. Responsible stewardship of the planet. Travel. Theater. Books. Inspired design marrying form and function.

Celebrating friends' successes, Collecting and dispensing random bits of useful information, Envisioning and building innovative new media products, Leading creative, collaborative, cross-disciplinary teams, Producing and hosting events, Scanning the cultural horizon, Theater and performing arts, Turning lemons into lemonade, Web design and development, Writing, editing and developing editorial voice

I had followed TED from afar since 1990, and first attended in 1998, while I was at HotWired. I've missed only one year since. So 2011 marks my 19th TED, my 13th year attending and my 6th year on staff. TED has always mapped really oddly and beautifully on to my own set of interests, which focus at the center of technology, entertainment and design (specifically the emergence of new, technology-driven media forms), but branch off wildly into biology, art, global development, world cultures, design, architecture, urban studies, storytelling, and the performing arts. That ONLY seems coherent in the context of TED.

Cooking ambitious meals. Belting Broadway tunes (consider yourself warned). Waterskiing. Also, I know a surprising amount about the role indigenous media played in Africa's independence movements.