Jennifer 8. Lee

A former New York Times reporter, Jennifer 8. Lee is an author, journalist and force in digital media.

A former New York Times reporter, Lee produced The Search for General Tso and The Emoji Story, both documentaries which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, and Artificial Gamer, which premiered October 2021 in theaters. She was one of the youngest full reporters ever hired at the Times. 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 a Sundance Sloan Episodic Fellow for The Harvard Computers, a episodic series about an underacknowledged group of women who contributed to key astronomical research in the early 20th Century while working in the Harvard Observatory. She has co-led an Angel List seed investment fund for Y Combinator and was a Fast Company Most Creative Person in Business in 2018. She co-chairs the World Economic Forum Global Future Council on Media, Entertainment and Sport.

Lee is cofounder of Emojination, a group whose motto is “Emoji by the people, for the people,” as well as a former vice-chair of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee. She graduated from Harvard with degrees in applied mathematics and economics.

Lee has served as the lead judge for the Knight News Challenge, a $25-million grant program to spur news innovation. She also serves on the boards of the Nieman Foundation, the Center for Public Integrity, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Hacks/Hackers, Awesome Foundation and the Robert F. Kennedy journalism awards. She is a member of the New York Public Library Young Lions Committee.