Emily Best

Emily Best is the founder and CEO of Seed&Spark, a unique organization that accelerates the cultural impact of storytelling. Seed&Spark’s crowdfunding platform and national education program have helped thousands of bold storytellers raise tens of millions of dollars to bring to life entirely new stories, and they've built an engaged community of a half-million creators from around the world. Seed&Spark build curriculum around a curated selection of those stories and delivers them for maximum impact through Film Forward, an enterprise training platform that helps some of the world's largest brands build more innovative and accountable cultures.

An advocate for equity inclusion in the entertainment industry (and the entire working world), Best regularly speaks at conferences and events about leveraging entertainment to build equity and sustainability for everyone. She also runs workshops to help independent content creators successfully crowdfund, build an audience and pitch their projects. Best’s talks on crowdfunding, pitching, and building equitable startups have been viewed millions of times. She writes regularly about the entertainment and startup ecosystems and serves as an advisor and mentor to dozens of early-stage companies.

In addition to her work at Seed&Spark, Best produces film, series, and VR that have premiered at Sundance, SXSW, and other festivals. Best produced projects including “Like the Water,” a feature film starring Caitlin FitzGerald (“Masters of Sex,” “UnREAL”); “Fck Yes!,” a digital series about sexual consent which she also co-wrote and co-directed; Janicza Bravo’s virtual reality film “Hard World for Small Things” which premiered at Sundance; and James Kaelan’s “The Visitor,” which premiered at Slamdance and was featured at Tribeca. Best was named a 2013 Indiewire Influencer, a 2014 New York Business Journal “Woman of Influence”, a 2015 Upstart 100 entrepreneur (Business Journals), received the Ivy Film Innovator Award in 2015 and in 2016, graduated from Techstars Boston, an elite accelerator program for the country’s top entrepreneurs. Best has raised millions of dollars in traditional funding, equity crowdfunding, and rewards-based crowdfunding and has personally participated in more than 300 crowdfunding campaigns.