Leila Connors Petersen

Leila Conners Petersen is co-founder and president of Tree Media Group and co-director of the Leonardo DiCaprio film The 11th Hour, a feature-length documentary on the state of the world and the state of humanity.

With a background in international politics, Petersen set out to build a production company that tells stories about the pressing issues of our time. Founded in 1996, Tree Media creates media to support and sustain civil society. As President of Tree Media, Petersen oversees development and production of subjects ranging from political to social topics and writes and produces projects for all media including film, television, web and print.

Tree Media works with groups and individuals such as the Council on Foreign Relations, NASA, RAND, President Mikhail Gorbachev’s Green Cross International, Leonardo DiCaprio, PBS and Norman Lear. As a writer, Petersen’s work has been published widely, in newspapers around the world from the International Herald Tribune, to the Los Angeles Times and Le Monde, as well as in magazines such as Wired and in book compilations. Most recently, her essay “Glossy: American Hegemony and the Culture of Death,” was published in War, Media and Propaganda.

Prior to Tree Media, Petersen was Associate Editor of New Perspectives Quarterly, an international journal of social and political thought where she has interviewed thinkers and policy makers including: Kofi Annan, Nafis Sadik, Betty Friedan, Hans Bethe, Rigoberta Menchu Tum, Boutros Boutros Ghali among others. She continues to work with New Perspectives Quarterly as Editor-at-Large and has served as Associate Editor of “Global Viewpoint” of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, an internationally distributed op-ed column that reaches 200 papers. In 1991, Petersen translated Jacques Attali's book from the French for Random House entitled, Millennium.

Petersen is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Pacific Council on International Policy. She is a member of the Writers Guild of America (WGA).

Topics

Has Our Planet Reached Its 11th Hour?

Telling Stories about the Pressing Issues of Our Times