A Glimpse Into the Near Future: A Conversation on Future Trends and Storytelling

Governors Debra Curtis and Jo DiSante, along with the Television Executives Peer Group Executive Committee, invite members to:

A Glimpse Into the Near Future: A Conversation on Future Trends and Storytelling

The best storytelling reflects or comments on our reality. Hearing from this panel of experts, we'll get ahead of the curve, glimpsing the future through the lens of Health, Culture, and Climate. Then, we'll discuss how these insights can inform storytelling and production practices.

Panelists*:

• Aarathi Krishnan - Expert, Foresight/Futurism
• Dr. Suzet McKinney - Expert, Public Health
• Anna Jane Joyner - Expert, Climate

Moderator:

• Juan Alfonso - Senior Vice President, Film and Television at Chernin Entertainment
  
• Gabriele Almon - Policy & Research, Television Academy
  

*participants subject to change

RSVP is required.
Academy Members: Click here to RSVP.
Foundation Alumni: Click here to RSVP.

Panelists

Anna Jayne Joyner

Anna Jane Joyner is a climate story consultant and the founder and director of Good Energy. With over fifteen years of experience in climate communications, she is driven by a passion for storytelling - and helping people find courage in the face of climate change. Anna Jane has worked relentlessly to establish bridges between artists, musicians, faith communities, Southerners, young audiences, and the climate movement. As a strategist at the intersection of climate and entertainment, she produced film and music videos and organized over 300 global partners around a youth-mobilization campaign for the 2015 Paris Climate Summit. Her work has been featured by Rolling Stone, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Glamour, Deadline, CNN, The Associated Press, The New York Times, and more.

Anna Jane's prior experience spans state and national climate campaigns for "Beyond Coal," water pollution, federal climate policy, voting rights, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and more. Her efforts to engage evangelicals on climate – including her own father, a prominent pastor – was featured in Years of Living Dangerously, an Emmy-award-winning Showtime documentary series on which she collaborated with Ian Somerhalder and Lesley Stahl. For the last five years, Anna Jane has co-hosted "No Place Like Home," a podcast that gets to the heart of climate change through storytelling.

Aarathi Krishnan

Aarathi Krishnan specializes in strategic and applied foresight for the humanitarian and development sector. A seasoned expert globally, she works at the intersection of humanitarian and development futures, strategic foresight, and anticipatory institutional transformation.

She is currently the Senior Advisor for Strategic Foresight for UNDP, where she is designing the integration of a systems approach to foresight across the Asia Pacific Bureau to build anticipatory capacities, decision making and programmatic offers to see, manage and respond to short and long term risk signals, policies and investments so that development futures can be flourishing for all.

In addition, she is also an Affiliate at Berkman Klein Centre for Internet and Society at Harvard University as well as a 2020-21 and 2021-22 Technology and Human Rights Fellow at the Harvard Carr Centre for Technology and Human Rights. The focus of her research is on Foresight and Decolonial Tech Ethics in Humanitarian Tech Governance.

Previously she has supported a range of international humanitarian organizations on embedding institutional foresight and global strategy to drive institutional and systems transformation, including the UN Resident Coordinators, UNV, the World Bank, UNHCR, MSF, ICRC and IFRC.

Dr. Suzet McKinney

Dr. McKinney is an expert who has frequently discussed healthcare disparities and racial inequities amplified by the pandemic, climate-related emergencies, biological and chemical threats and natural disasters. She's been featured on CNN, ABC, NBC Nightly News, and in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Crain's Chicago Business and The Chicago Tribune, among other notable publications. She has led multiple emergency response efforts, including Chicago's 2014-2015 Ebola response; the operational response to the 2009 H1N1 outbreak; the 2012 NATO Summit response, and the 2010 Haiti Earthquake response.

In academia, Dr. McKinney serves as an Instructor in the Division of Translational Policy and Leadership Development at Harvard University's T.H. Chan School of Public Health and as an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Health Policy Administration at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health. She is the co-author of the text: Public Health Emergency Preparedness: Practical Solutions for the Real World (2018) and was named one of Chicago's 50 Most Powerful Women (2020), and one of Chicago's Notable Women in Healthcare (2018 & 2019).

Dr. McKinney holds her Doctorate degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health, with a focus on preparedness planning, leadership and workforce development. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Biology from Brandeis University (Waltham, MA) where she was also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Fellow. She received her Master of Public Health degree (Health Care Administration) and certificates in Managed Care and Health Care Administration from Benedictine University in Lisle, IL.

Dr. McKinney serves on numerous boards and advisory committees. Her current board memberships include the Board of Directors for Wintrust Financial Corporation, Lurie Children's Hospital, Thresholds, and the Advisory Board of the Executive's Club of Chicago. Dr. McKinney is Co-Chair of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM), Health and Medicine Division's Forum on Medical and Public Health Preparedness for Disasters and Emergencies. She also serves on the Science and Security Board for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and is the former Chairperson of the Board of Scientific Counselors for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC), Center for Public Health Preparedness and Response.

Moderators

Gabriele Almon

Gabriele is the Senior Director of Policy & Research at the Television Academy. In her role, she explores how the Academy can meaningfully engage and impact timely topics. Previously, Gabriele founded a boutique creative agency, Brain + Bullish, which specialized in story strategy and narrative shifting for pressing global issues. Through Brain + Bullish, she consulted entertainment companies on storylines that touched on crises, disasters, and emerging social trends.

Throughout her career, Gabriele has served as an advisor to Fortune 500 companies, domestic and international government agencies, and numerous humanitarian organizations.  She was appointed to FEMA's National Advisory Council, where she served as a foresight and technology subject matter expert from 2016-2019. She holds an undergraduate degree from Howard University and master's degree from the University of Southern California (USC). Gabriele was recently awarded USC's Price Pioneer designation, one of only ninety awardees in the history of the Price School of Public Policy, for her bridge-building work between entertainment, media, and the public sector.

Juan Alfonso

Juan Alfonso is an SVP, Film & Television at Chernin Entertainment where he works on development of new projects and production of current television series, including the upcoming season of Truth Be Told for Apple TV+, starring Octavia Spencer.

In his previous role, as SVP of Original Programming at Starz, Alfonso worked in development for a number of shows including the horror-comedy Shining Vale starring Courtney Cox and Greg Kinnear, as well as Gaslit, starring Julia Roberts and Sean Penn. Alfonso also contributed on three separate spinoffs of the hit show Power and the television prequels for Lionsgate's John Wick franchise.

Before that, Alfonso spent seven years at Disney/ABC Studios, where he developed the Emmy-winning American Crime from Academy Award winner John Ridley; Marvel's Agent Carter; and Grand Hotel produced by Eva Longoria. In his last year with Disney, he worked under an overall deal for showrunners Michele Fazekas & Tara Butters and served as Executive Producer on Emergence, which aired on ABC.

Previously, Alfonso led new content development and production for ESPN International, overseeing the launch of new documentaries, scripted programs and selected studio shows in all 5 continents. This included the network's first foreign language scripted series, El Diez; as well as documentaries like The Clemente Effect and L'Arbitre, winner of the United Nations prize at New York Festivals in 2010. 

As a playwright, he wrote An Educated Guess, a play about the modern immigration experience developed at Steppenwolf Theatre and New York Theatre Workshop.  He recently completed his next three plays in residency at the Geffen Playhouse's Writers' Room program, the first of which got selected for the Boise Contemporary Theater's BIPOC Playwrights Festival.