New York, NY
USA

917-312-5999

isabel
at
draves
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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.