Jennifer 8. Lee

Jennifer 8. Lee is an entrepreneur, documentary producer, journalist, seed investor and emoji activist.

She has co-led an Angel List seed investment fund for Y Combinator, was a 2018 Fast Company Most Creative Person in Business, and is a Sundance Sloan fellow. She is co-founder and CEO of Plympton, a literary studio that innovates in digital publishing. Among their projects is Recovering the Classics, and a VR film based on George Saunders' Man Booker Prize winning novel, Lincoln in the Bardo.

A former New York Times reporter, Lee is a producer of The Search for General Tso and The Emoji Story (formerly Picture Character), both which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festivals. She was also an executive producer for The Price, which premiered at SXSW, and an associate producer for Give Me Liberty and the Emmy-winning Chasing Coral, both of which premiered at Sundance.

She is also the author of the New York Times-bestselling book, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (Twelve, 2008), which established fortune cookies are originally Japanese. Lee's recent work focuses a lot on misinformation, having co-founded the Credibility Coalition and MisinfoCon. She is a co-chair of the World Economic Forum's Global Futures Council for Media, Entertainment and Sport

She is the founder of Emojination, a grassroots group whose motto is "Emoji by the people, for the people." As part of that organization, she successfully lobbied for a dumpling, hijab and interracial couple emojis among others. She cofounded Emojicon and was a vice-chair of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee. Lee has served as the lead judge for the $25 million Knight News Challenge, and on the launch team for Upworthy.

Lee also serves on the the Center for Public Integrity, MuckRock Foundation, the Digital Public Library of America, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Hacks/Hackers and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Inside Climate News. She also serves on the committees for the New York Public Library Young Lions, the Robert F. Kennedy journalism awards, and SXSW programming.

Lee graduated with a degree in Applied Math and Economics from Harvard, where she was vice president of The Harvard Crimson. She then spent a year at Beijing University on fellowship.