A multidisciplinary business leader with experience across media, design and technology.
Emi Kolawole is a multi-media professional and business leader with two decades of experience across media, design and technology. Today, Emi is at Alphabet’s moonshot factory (formerly Google[X]). As a Firestarter and Project Lead, Emi is responsible for leading talented innovators and technologists at the earliest stage of developing breakthrough technologies across a diverse set of disciplines, including data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.
TEDx Dirigo, “Design for Worldview”, 2016.
Emi is an award-winning multimedia professional with experience in building new television, print and online products for celebrated media organizations.
Emi is a graduate of The Madeira School in McLean, Virginia, and she holds a bachelor’s degree in theater studies and international relations from Wellesley College. Her career started in media, when she was invited by Bill Moyers to join the weekly public television show “NOW with Bill Moyers and David Brancaccio” as a production assistant. She later went on to become a fact-checker for Congressional Quarterly where she contributed to the CQ Almanac. She went on to spend three years as a Staff Writer at the University of Pennsylvania Annenberg Public Policy Center’s FactCheck.org. While there, Emi developed the program’s video product “Just the Facts” and completed her master’s degree in film and video production from American University.
She spent three years at FactCheck.org before she became the associate producer for “Washington Week with Gwen Ifill” where she produced the show’s Webcast Extra product and led the redesign of the show’s website. While working on “Washington Week”, Emi was invited to join The Washington Post as a producer for the PostPolitics section. She was soon named the founding editor of the Post’s section covering innovation. In that role, Emi launched the new content vertical and was soon awarded the Post’s Publisher’s Award for her live coverage of the Mars rover landing. She was named a member of the first class of Washington, D.C. Global Shapers by The World Economic Forum and joined the first class of Shapers to attend the Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland. Emi was also named French-American Foundation Young Leader.
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As a young web journalist, she is keeping one of America’s most respected papers in the mainstream.
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/ THE GRIO 100, 2013 /
Emi spent three years at Stanford University, serving as the d.school’s Editor-in-Residence and as a Senior Media Designer.
In 2013, Emi was invited to serve as the editor-in-residence at The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University -- widely known as the d.school. She served as the Editor-in-Residence and as a Senior Media Designer and Lecturer at the d.school, working at the crossroads of media and design thinking with a focus on bias (race, gender and sexuality) and creative practice. She designed and facilitated workshops, classes and experiences - in addition to her work launching and running the d.school blog, 'the whiteboard.’ She was a member of the d.school's Media Experiments Project conducted in collaboration with Knight Foundation. While at the d.school, Emi launched and served as Curator for the Palo Alto, California hub of The World Economic Forum’s Global Shapers community.
Following her time at the d.school, Emi relocated to Washington, D.C. and founded the design consultancy Dexign LLC (pronounced “design”). During that time, she designed and conducted workshops and designed and launched independent media products for clients. A call from Alphabet’s moonshot factory drew her back to the Bay Area.
Emi is a leader and builder who quickly identifies opportunities and leads teams to build the prototypes and products that break new ground and show organizations what’s possible.
Emi started her journey at Alphabet’s moonshot factory (formerly GoogleX) in 2017 as the Head of Internal Communications. She led that division for three years, working closely with the CEO and executive leadership team. She prototyped and launched the first employee handbook and its first newsletter. She restructured the organization’s new hire orientation program and promotion criteria in addition to launching and supporting other programs and projects that contributed to developing the division’s culture of innovation. While leading and scaling the internal communications program over the course of the global pandemic, Emi completed her MBA with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
In 2020, Emi made the unlikely transition from being Head of Internal Communications to becoming a Project Lead (known internally as a “Firestarter”) — one of a small group of multi-disciplinary professionals charged with launching new companies for Alphabet.
In her spare time, Emi enjoys staying active and collaborating on creative projects. She swims, runs, cycles, weight lifts and practices yoga regularly. Emi also enjoys traveling and serves on the board of her high school alma mater, The Madeira School, as well as on the board of the New York-based non-profit grant-making organization Creative Capital. Emi was named an Aspen First Movers Fellow in 2021 and now serves on The Steering Committee of The Aspen Institute’s Socrates Program.