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New York, NY
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917-312-5999

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Isabel Walcott Draves is a NYC-based entrepreneur, tech startup consultant and an expert in building communities. She has worked at the crossroads of technology, media and startups for over twenty years.

Isabel's most recent initiative is founding Creative Technology Week, a major crowd-sourced festival in New York City scheduled for May 2016. The festival celebrates the accomplishments and innovations of hundreds of major generators of creative technology with events all over New York City, surfacing the best new developments in the field and providing a nexus for a global network of people applying new technologies to art, music, dance, theatre, advertising, media, gaming, entertainment and education.

In 2009 she started Leaders in Software and Art (LISA), an organization founded to bring together cutting-edge software and electronic artists, curators, collectors, and coders to share their work. Since then Isabel has hosted exclusive monthly salons across NYC featuring presentations by artists who work with technology; produced two day-long conferences; created partnerships with the Big Screen Plaza in New York City's Fashion district, Coral Springs Museum of Art in Florida, Longwood Center for the Arts in Virginia, and Art Silicon Valley in California; and promoted the careers of LISA alumni speakers on Twitter @softwareandart. Over 200 past LISA speakers are featured in the artist portfolio at softwareandart.com. Isabel is also the business manager for her husband, the software artist Scott Draves, and the renowned Electric Sheep open source software art system.

As a consultant, Isabel has worked with a series of tech-oriented startups in a strategic advisory capacity, including Red Thread/Sunny Bates Associates, Green Home, Linden Lab, She Speaks, and Communispace. She worked with the Cambridge-MIT Institute to document a multi-year grant program, helped launch the Business-to-Business Word-of-Mouth Marketing Practice at Edelman, and launched the Pioneer Program at Sxip Networks Inc., where she promoted the concept of a new platform for online digital identity to a community of Internet insiders.

In the early 2000's, Isabel ran the Digital Security Board at The Research Board, a private think tank for Fortune 100 CIO's owned by Gartner Inc. There, she led a think tank for a group of Chief Information Security Officers from the world's largest enterprises, identifying and analyzing emerging trends and conducting topical discussion sessions. She also project-managed the successful completion of an online content management system on behalf of ArvatoSystems at Bertelsmann, a major international media company. From 2002- 2005, she was an instructor for the Media Management master's degree program at The New School in New York City.

From 1996-2001, Isabel was founder and CEO of SmartGirl Internette Inc., the first social media site exclusively by and for teenage girls. Word of the site spread virally, garnering worldwide press attention. SmartGirl -- which featured over 20,000 pages of user-driven content, an active community of hundreds of thousands of girls and millions of hits a month -- was acquired by the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan in 2001 and is still active. Isabel has a BA from Harvard and an MA from Columbia.




Companies Founded

Creative Technology Week
2015 to Present

Leaders in Software and Art
2009 to Present

Strategic Internet Consulting
2001 to Present

Salontrepreneur
Monthly networking dinners for tech start-up founders
2001-2006

SmartGirl Internette Inc.
1996 to 2001


Education

MA in Communications, Computing and Technology
Teachers College
Columbia University, 1996

BA in Literature with Honors
Russian, French and American
Harvard College, 1991


Clients and Employers

Red Thread/Sunny Bates Associates
2013-present

Software Artist Scott Draves
2008-present

Electric Sheep
2008-present

Flying Ventures LLP
2010-present

Harvard University Holden Choirs
2009-2010

Pink Army.org
2009-2010

NYC Alliance Against Sexual Assault
2009

VentureBeat's GamesBeat Conference
2009

Freedom to Connect Conference
2009

Boston Conservatory
2008

Green Home
2008

Linden Lab
2007

Science Service Inc.
2007

She Speaks
2007

Sarah Noble Executive Recruiting
2007, 2010

Ignition Ventures
2006-2007

Communispace
2006

Digitas
2006

Edelman
2005-2006

The New School
2002 to 2005

The Research Board at Gartner Inc.
2003 to 2004

Arvato Systems at Bertelsmann
2001 to 2002

Tom Nicholson Associates
1994-1995

Teach For America
1991-1994



Copyright © 2010-2015 Isabel Walcott Draves. All rights reserved.