Cyndi Stivers

Why you should listen

Cyndi Stivers is TED's director of curation. She is a member of boards, a teacher and mentor and a perpetual student.

After attending the conference for many years, she joined the team in 2016 to found the TED Residency, an idea incubator at TED's New York headquarters; she moved over to the Curation team in 2019. Stivers started out in hot-type newspapers and has since shepherded media startups and reinvigorated venerable brands on nearly every platform, including magazines, television, radio and online, right back to the early days of the consumer internet. From 1995 to 2005, while in charge of North American operations for London-based Time Out Group Ltd., she led the creation of Time Out magazines, guidebooks and websites for New York and Chicago. She was a longtime trustee of Barnard College, of which she is a proud alumna. For more work history, please see LinkedIn.