The Moxie Institute is a cutting edge film studio for the 21st century. Led by Tiffany Shlain, founder of The Webby Awards and winner of a Tribeca Film Festival’s “2012 Disruptive Innovation Award,” the team’s last four films have premiered at Sundance, have won over 45 awards, and have been singled out by the NYTimes for “Examining everything from the big bang to twitter.” Two of their films have been selected by The U.S. State Department to screen at embassies around the world as part of the American Film Showcase. Connected was also selected for the 2012 tour, and the Let it Ripple short film, Brain Power: From Neurons to Networks was chosen for the 2013 tour.
Their past projects include: award-winning feature documentary, Connected: An Autoblogography about Love, Death & Technology which explores interdependence in the 21st century, Yelp: With Apologies to Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, which explores the importance of unplugging occasionally from technology, The Tribe which explores American Jewish Identity was singled out by The Sundance Institute, The New York Times, and Variety as an example of innovative distribution using the Internet and engaging audiences with live events, and was the first documentary to reach #1 on iTunes, and Life, Liberty & The Pursuit of Happiness, which explores reproductive rights in America.
The team’s latest project is a short film series called Let it Ripple: Mobile Films for Global Change. These films employ a new type of filmmaking they pioneered called “Cloud FIlmmaking,” which experiments with making films collaboratively with people all over the world, and then providing free customized versions of those films for organizations working to make the world better. Find out more by reading The Cloud Filmmaking Manifesto. The first film in the series, A Declaration of Interdependence, is a rewriting of the U.S. Declaration of Independence and is a cloud-sourced, user generated montage of videos and graphics. The second film of this series, Engage premiered a year later on Interdependence Day in September 2012. Brain Power: From Neurons to Networks soon followed along with its accompanying TED Book, premiering at The California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco on November 8, 2012.
The Moxie Institute was founded by Tiffany Shlain and UC Berkeley robotics professor and artist Ken Goldberg, who have over 20 years of experience with films, the Internet, live events, symposia, and a variety of new media projects that deliver powerful and resonant experiences in support of social awareness and change. Professor Goldberg is also the director for UCBerkeley’s Center for Data and Democracy.
Along with its many film projects, The Moxie Institute also hosts conferences and symposiums about new forms of filmmaking and distribution. The last two events they co-hosted included one at Columbia University in NYC and one at UCBerkeley in the Bay Area.
