Craig Watkins

Professor & Founding Director, Institute for Media Innovation

S. Craig Watkins is a Professor and the Founding Director of the Institute for Media Innovation (IMI) at the University of Texas at Austin. IMI is a boutique hub for research and design with a specific mission to experiment with understanding and designing more inclusive applications of tech such as augmented reality and artificial intelligence. He is the author of five books including The Digital Edge: How Black and Latino Youth Navigate Digital Inequality (2018)and Don’t Knock the Hustle: Young Creatives, Tech Ingenuity, and the Making of the New Innovation Economy (2019).

Craig’s expertise has been featured in a mix of places including, the New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Newsweek, TIME, and National Public Radio and shared with audiences at SXSW, Facebook, U.S. Department of Education, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, and the Aspen Institute.

His current research focuses on the future of media, technology, and innovation and ongoing analysis of how diverse populations adapt to the wider diffusion of the internet all around us.