The Narrative R&D Lab’s new Community of Practice brings together practitioners across the full narrative workflow—researchers, creators, distributors, funders, and domain experts—with a singular goal: building and stress-testing shared infrastructure by running real campaigns with real audiences.

For 2026-2027, we chose artificial intelligence as our topic focus. AI narratives are forming fast across work, education, and civic life, even as audiences are fragmented, and the stories haven’t yet calcified.

AI is doing two things at once for narrative practitioners: it’s a subject the public is still forming opinions about, and a set of tools reshaping how research, story development, production, and distribution happen day-to-day. That double role is part of why this cohort is intentionally cross-disciplinary. Researchers sit next to creators, distribution leads next to funders. The most interesting questions about narrative experimentation live between those seats.

The single criterion for membership is willingness to put real work, including failures, on the table. Harmony Labs’ Director of Strategy and Practice Rob Avruch spoke with each member about what drew them here and how they’re thinking about AI narrative work.

Meet the cohort.

Felipe Estefan

Founder and CEO, Curiosity Capital | Distribution and Systems Operator Felipe is the Founder & CEO of Curiosity Capital, an initiative that seeks to unlock narrative power by investing in impact-driven production studios and generating actionable audience intelligence. He is an Executive Producer for films including The Territory (Emmy Winner/NatGeo) and Apocalypse in the Tropics (BAFTA nominee/Netflix), and previously served as Vice President for Narrative Change and Latin America at Luminate.

“The massive shifts in the way that stories are financed, produced, and distributed, alongside major technological developments, call for innovative solutions that will increase the agency and impact of storytellers and narrative strategists. Those solutions can only be developed and implemented successfully through collaboration.”

Angelica Quicksey

Managing Director, New_ Public | AI domain expert Angelica is a public interest technology leader with expertise in product strategy, design, research, and policy. She is currently a Managing Director at New_ Public, a nonprofit product studio focused on reimagining community, connection, and conversation online, and previously led design and digital transformation initiatives in the public sector.

“The narrative around artificial intelligence is anchored in harm—it’s affecting people’s jobs, the environment, national security, and the content we see online. But I don’t think the future of how AI shows up in our economy and social life online has to be harmful. We can shape the technology itself and how we build and deploy it to be beneficial to people.”

Ben Wessel

Political strategist and philanthropic leader, Emerson Collective | Learning-oriented funder Ben is a political strategist and philanthropic leader focused on strengthening democracy through elections, culture, and long-term systems change. He oversees a portfolio spanning voter engagement, digital communications, media ecosystems, and more. Previously, he served as Executive Director of NextGen America, where he helped lead one of the largest youth civic engagement programs in the country, registering more than 1.5 million young voters.

“I was drawn to this community of practice because I’m interested in helping translate the Harmony Labs media research into more actionable strategies for donors [and] grantees.”

Kiana Kazemi

Director of AI Strategy, Vocal Media | AI domain expert Kiana is a creative technologist operating at the intersections of AI, media, and progressive politics. As Director of AI Strategy at Vocal Media, she leads the development of AI-native infrastructure that allows social change movements communicate at the speed and fluency of internet culture. She co-founded Intersectional Environmentalist, where she grew the organization's reach to millions monthly and consulted on digital strategy for brands and institutions like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Pinterest, Netflix, and REI.

“The most powerful stories about climate, healthcare, and economic justice have always come from the people closest to those issues. But right now, most of the exciting AI-driven media is coming out of commercial and entertainment contexts, not movement spaces. I want to know what it looks like when the people shaping public narratives around the issues that matter most are also the ones pushing the creative boundaries of AI storytelling.”

Calvin Kia Abbasi

Co-founder & Chief Strategy Officer, ANDRON; Executive Director, FORGE Lab | Experimental narrative practitioner Calvin is a narrative strategist, writer, and cultural architect working at the intersection of identity, technology, and civic power. He is co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of ANDRON and the Executive Director of the FORGE Lab, where he is building narrative infrastructure for the algorithmic age: creator ecosystems, cultural intelligence, and real-world pathways of belonging designed to reshape how identity, purpose, and public meaning are formed. He also works in and around the AI ecosystem on people-first AI, nonprofit strategy, and the civic questions raised by systems that increasingly mediate human attention and meaning.

“Most AI narratives are not really about AI. They are about dignity, power, authority, labor, belonging, and who gets to count as fully human in a world increasingly mediated by systems people do not control.”

Nia Nixon

Associate Professor and Director, Language and Learning Analytics Lab, UC Irvine | Audience and identity formation researcher Nia is an Associate Professor at UC Irvine and Director of the Language and Learning Analytics Lab (LaLA Lab), where she studies what AI does to people in relation to each other. Her research examines how AI teammates reshape the social conditions of collaboration—who speaks, whose ideas get taken up, how groups reason morally together, and whether people maintain a sense of themselves as legitimate knowers. A Jacobs Foundation Research Fellow and Distinguished International Professor at the University of Tübingen, her work spans education, cognitive science, social psychology, and computational discourse science.

“The dominant narratives about AI, whether optimistic or alarming, focus on what AI does to individuals. What’s almost entirely missing is a narrative about what AI does to us in relation to each other—how it reshapes moral deliberation, whose knowledge gets legitimized, and the conditions of genuine participation in group life. Most people don’t yet have a language for that, which makes this an unusually generative moment to help them find one.”

Milan de Vries

Independent political data consultant and academic researcher, SNF Agora Institute, Johns Hopkins University | Audience and identity formation researcher Milan has spent the last decade applying innovative data science and technology to political and civic organizing. He is originally a molecular biologist with a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Milan spent eight years as the Director of Analytics at MoveOn. Since leaving MoveOn, Milan has worked as an independent political data consultant and, as an academic researcher, holds an appointment at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University where he studies the civic landscapes that shape American democracy.

“Massively disruptive technological shifts are not that unique, but people are primed to be unusually passive about this one, believing that how AI changes the world will just happen instead of being up to choices that people make.”

Cara Nicole

Educational creator and YouTuber | Creator Cara is an educational creator whose content covers personal finance through the lens of pop culture. She has an audience of over 300k, primarily from her YouTube video essays, and has been featured in Teen Vogue, Yahoo Finance, and Upworthy. Through the topic of personal finance, Cara also aims to address issues surrounding sustainability and progressive economic policy. She frequently works with progressive groups to help advocate for better economic safety nets that can improve everyday people’s financial futures.

“How can we get people to stop immediately dismissing a video as soon as AI is mentioned. Right now, it seems many online audiences don’t want to hear anything beyond blanket criticism of AI; however, I worry this prevents us from exploring ways to improve AI policy and ways to positively use AI.”

David Park

President, Learning Heroes | Experimental narrative practitioner David is President of Learning Heroes, where he oversees organizational strategy, programming, and partnerships focused on strengthening relationships between families and schools. As Learning Heroes’ first hire, he leads the organization’s growth and major public awareness initiatives, including the Go Beyond Grades campaign, which has reached more than 30 million people nationwide. Over the past decade, David has focused on understanding parent mindsets and translating research into campaigns and strategies that move families from awareness to action.

“At Learning Heroes, we know parents are not monolithic. We’ve identified different parent personas with different motivations, concerns, and relationships with schools. I’m curious whether AI can help identify and tailor narrative pathways that resonate with different parent mindsets without losing authenticity, trust, or humanity.”

Joe Posner

Interdisciplinary video creator and director, Fire-Works | Creator Joe is an interdisciplinary video creator and director. He co-founded Vox Video in 2014, freely mixing his passions for journalism, animation, and music, and spent 8 years building their award-winning YouTube channel and Emmy-nominated streaming franchises like Explained on Netflix and Glad You Asked for YouTube Originals. Since leaving Vox, he helped launch Semafor and started Fire-Works, where he produces Dream On, a documentary series about people rebuilding the American Dream.

“Everything good in my career has come from consistently meeting new, amazing people who are navigating the same struggles I am, and trying to learn from them. This thing seems to be right in line with that.”

Chrissy Blitz

VP of Communications and External Affairs, Economic Security Project | Experimental narrative practitioner Chrissy has roots in New York gubernatorial politics and crisis communications, advocacy for veterans and military families, storytelling for Parkinson’s patients and caregivers, brand positioning for corporations and multinational executives, and federal advocacy for paid family leave and family economic resilience. She currently serves as VP of Communications and External Affairs at the Economic Security Project (ESP), where she focuses on building economic power for young and economically anxious Americans.

“I am excited about access to more rigorous testing and tracking tools that go beyond traditional analytics. RCT testing, baseline surveys, and pre/post measurement will give us a much clearer picture of the ways in which our narrative work is shifting understanding and behavior on economic issues, not just generating engagement.”

Peter Koechley

Strategy Director and Co-founder, Alongside Advisors | Distribution and systems operator Peter has been helping teams navigate seismic technological change for 20+ years, from online video to social media and now to AI. A veteran of The Onion, MoveOn, and Upworthy, he’s now the strategy director at a project leveraging generative AI for anti-authoritarian grassroots campaigns and cofounder of Alongside Advisors, a change-management and AI adaptation firm serving nonprofits and companies alike.

“AI is the biggest story in technology, across the economy, and throughout society—and it will continue to grow exponentially in significance in the coming years. I want to collaborate and learn from smart people obsessed with the transformation from different vantage points.”

Jamie Gutfreund

Founder and CEO, Creator Vision | Distribution and systems operator Jamie has guided companies through major shifts in media and technology since the earliest days of the consumer internet. She has held senior roles at Microsoft, Expedia, Creative Artists Agency, Hasbro, and WPP. She leads Creator Vision, serves as Co-Chair of the IAB Creator Economy Board, and reports on the creator economy for Forbes. Her current work includes Apples to Apples, a proprietary framework for evaluating creator economy platforms and capabilities.

“One of the most underdiscussed questions is how the briefing process evolves in an AI-driven creative world. AI can increase the scale and speed of content creation, but the challenge is maintaining a distinct human point of view while using those systems effectively.”

Paul Goodnight

Vice President, Marketing & Brand Planning, BuzzFeed | Distribution and systems operator Paul is a media industry professional with 15 years’ experience creating content for some of the biggest brands in the world including Nike, TurboTax, BuzzFeed, HuffPost, and more. Spending the last 8 years focused primarily on social media publishing, Paul has won numerous awards for effective and creative content production as well as created the “cultural moment accelerator program” pairing brands, creators and clients with the moments that define consumer culture throughout the year.

“The current narrative is that it’s inevitable that AI will dominate the media. But at the same time humans playing sports live is the most viewed programming in the world. How can these two things be true at one time?”

Beck Tench

Principal Investigator, Project Zero; Co-founder, Center for Digital Thriving, Harvard Graduate School of Education | AI domain expert Beck is a Principal Investigator at Project Zero and co-founder of the Center for Digital Thriving at Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she researches how we have more personal, collective, and institutional agency in our digital lives, especially with AI. She is especially interested in how market forces, human connection, and awareness of life as we’re living it shape our experiences of tech. An information scientist by training, she was a science museum exhibit designer before this work, and brings a participatory design lens to her research.

“We want to know how to support having more digital agency (meaningful choice, intention and control over how tech fits into our lives) on individual, collective, and institutional levels. In particular we want to know how to support digital agency for three audiences: educators, technologists, and young people. Our hypothesis is that if educators and technologists have the agency to align their work with their values, young people will experience more digital agency, and more hope, as a result.”

Maxwell Zorick

Program Director, Elevate Dialogue; Civic (Re)Solve | Learning-oriented funder Max leads the Elevate Dialogue portfolio at Civic (Re)Solve, a 10-year fund focused on investing in American civic life, working at the intersection of new media, civic connection, and culture. Previously, he was Senior Director of Social Impact at the MTV Entertainment Group at Paramount.

“More than any message or idea – what are the most effective platforms and communicators to reach Americans who aren't constantly absorbed in politics, news, and policy? Our media landscape is changing at light-speed, and we need to be in close conversation and community across funders and practitioners to understand what's working or not.”

Samantha Wright

Narrative strategist and impact producer | Experimental narrative practitioner Samantha has led impact campaigns for films including Dark Waters, American Factory, and Judas and the Black Messiah at Participant, connecting storytelling to policy reform and public engagement. More recently, her work has focused on narrative research, philanthropy, and field-building through roles at Earth Alliance and Waverley Street Foundation. Based in Berkeley, CA, she is currently exploring emerging questions at the intersection of AI, narrative, and public life.

“I think we’re underestimating how much AI is changing not just narratives, but the conditions under which narratives form. Between liquid content, algorithmic remixing, and increasingly agentic forms of communication, stories are becoming more participatory, adaptive, and unstable — often emerging from strange corners of the internet long before institutions know how to name them.”

Rob Strain

Founder, Lemon Battery; Creative Director, The Rithm Project | AI domain expert Rob is the founder of Lemon Battery, a small strategy and design studio that helps social-impact leaders bring their most important ideas into the world. For the last two years, he’s been supporting the launch of The Rithm Project, an intergenerational movement to reclaim and evolve human connection in the age of AI. He wears the team’s “creative director” hat, translating research and insights into mediums that travel.

“How can we balance sticky, scalable campaigns with narrative work that holds nuance? Rithm’s theory of change hinges on building people’s discernment, which feels mismatched with short-form, “do-this” media. I want to know which examples in adjacent fields—climate, public health, democracy—have scaled nuance without flattening it, and what a successful “discernment-building” campaign actually looks like in the wild.”

Stay connected

Work from the Community of Practice will be published as it develops. If you’d like to follow along, sign up for the Harmony Labs newsletter. Questions or ideas? Write to Lab director Rob Avruch.

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This project is supported in part by the Gates Foundation. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the foundation.