Nonny de la Peña,
Founder & CEO, Emblematic Group and Award-Winning Filmmaker & Journalist
Nonny de la Peña is CEO & Founder of award-winning innovation company Emblematic Group. Often acknowledged as "The Godmother of Virtual Reality," she is a pioneer of virtual, augmented, and mixed reality who is widely credited with inventing the genre of immersive journalism. In 2012, her piece "Hunger in Los Angeles" debuted at the Sundance Film Festival, marking it's place in history as the first VR experience to be shown at the festival, and since then her work has continued to elicit global recognition at institutions and events such as the Victoria and Albert Museum, Brooklyn Museum, World Economic Forum and Venice International Film Festival. In 2017, Nonny was named one of CNET's 20 Most Influential Latinos in Tech and most recently she received the 2018 WSJ Magazine Technology Innovator of the Year award. Under her leadership, Emblematic has built a critically acclaimed body of work that includes tracking the chaos of the Syrian civil war to working with AT&T on projects that leverage the future of 5G technologies. Her newest breakthrough is Emblematic's WebVR platform REACH which creates scalable distribution in the medium, democratizes content authorship and empowers new voices to share their stories.