As the Deputy Director of the Norman Lear Center (a media-focused think tank at the University of Southern California) Johanna Blakley spends much of her time exploring how our entertainment interacts with our political, commercial and social habits. She is especially interested in the surprising impact of intellectual property rights on innovation, organizing conferences around the lack of creative ownership in fashion as well as technology and the ownership of creative content.

Blakley has worked across a huge variety of media platforms -- producing for the web on a large scale, conducting gaming research, coordinating events for film festivals and executing consumer research on entertainment and politics. Drawing on this vast body of experience, she also lectures at USC and helped develop their masters program in Public Diplomacy.