Keynote: The Fourth Act: Strategies for Community Engagement – Andrew DeVigal and Laura LoForti

A Fourth Act works with photographers, community organizations, funders and filmmakers to build audience engagement strategies from the ground up. Hear how this new initiative, along with their innovative mobile web app Harvis, is working with Tim Matsui and other content producers to leverage stories into powerful forces of change.

Andrew DeVigal is an Emmy-award winning innovative strategist who builds bridges by connecting ideas and people together to produce meaningful and interactive stories. As multimedia editor of The New York Times, he helped transform and evolve the print newsroom into the digital and interactive era. At The Times, he conceived and directed ground-breaking story forms and processes that help shape the industry today. He's used his extensive reach into various disciplines to connect the right people to collaborate and produce extraordinary work. He recently co-founded A Fourth Act to help redefine the territories of how and why we tell stories.

A former writer and multimedia producer, Laura Lo Forti has been adopting non-traditional approaches to journalism for the past ten years. She helps mediamakers, not-for-profits and social action groups incorporate participatory practices to tell more inclusive stories that spark civic engagement and encourage systemic change. Through her work as a "story midwife", supporting impacted communities through the transformative journey of bringing their personal narratives to life, she's become a strong advocate of engaging marginalized individuals in self-representation and including them in the decision-making process affecting their lives. With World Press Photo award winner Brenda Ann Kenneally she co-founded The Raw File, an ongoing multimedia series of immersive documentary work raising conversations that intersect the lines of race and class.

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