06 TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL AND DISRUPTOR FOUNDATION ANNOUNCE HONOREES FOR SEVEN ANNUAL DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION AWARDS

2016 TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL AND DISRUPTOR FOUNDATION ANNOUNCE HONOREES FOR SEVENTH ANNUAL DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION AWARDS April 4th, 2016

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 2016 TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL AND DISRUPTOR FOUNDATION ANNOUNCE HONOREES FOR SEVENTH ANNUAL DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION AWARDS

Award Collaboration with Harvard professor Clayton M. Christensen Recognizes Leading Innovators and Creators Impacting Social Transformation

NEW YORK, NY- April 4, 2016 -The Tribeca Film Festival (TFF), presented by AT&T, today announced the honorees for its seventh annual Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Awards, held in collaboration with Harvard professor Clay Christensen and the Disruptor Foundation. Co-sponsored by Accenture, AT&T and media sponsor The Guardian, the awards will be moderated by Perri Peltz at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center BMCC on Friday April 22 at 11:00am. Festival co-founder, Craig Hatkoff, is the Chief Curator of the awards. The 15th edition of the Tribeca Film Festival runs from April 13 to 24.

The 2016 honorees include:

Actor, director, producer, writer, and humanitarian Nate Parker will receive the Theodore Parker Prize (presented by Darren Walker of the Ford Foundation); Scott Harrison, Founder and CEO of Charity Water; Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, the nation's premier defender of liberty and individual freedom; Louie Psihoyos, Academy Award-winning filmmaker ( the Cove and Racing Extinction ); Professor Jennifer Jacquet, Ph.D., author of IS SHAME NECESSARY? (Pantheon, 2015) and an environmental social scientist who studies large-scale cooperation dilemmas, such as overfishing, climate change, and the wildlife trade; Fabio Zaffagnini, the creator of Rockin1000, whose crowdsourced 1000-musician performance of the Foo Fighters' Learn To Fly has reached 30 million views on YouTube; Brent Stapelkamp, a researcher who tracked and photographed Cecil the Lion for nine years; Alan Eustace, world-record holder for Highest Freefall Jump (135,889 feet) earned in the process of piloting the system built by the StratEx team; Max Kenner, founder and executive director of Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) which enrolls incarcerated individuals in academic programs culminating in Bard College degrees; Emily Callahan and Amber Jackson, co-founders of Blue Latitudes, whose mission is to globally scale the conversion of oil rigs into coral reefs; Lending Club, the world's largest online crowd-sourced and funded marketplace connecting borrowers and investors; The Suskind Family (Ron, Cornelia, Walter and Owen Suskind) for unleashing ability and creativity in those with autism; Jenna Arnold and Greg Segal, co-founders of ORGANIZE, which is looking to put itself out of business by solving the organ donation crisis; and juvenile justice reformer Adam Foss, who by shifting his focus from incarceration to transforming lives is reinventing the role of the criminal prosecutor.

This year's honorees are a diverse group whose achievements lead by example uniting communities that are offering new solutions to some of society's most challenging issues, said Craig Hatkoff, TFF co-founder and chief curator for TDIA. We are thrilled to celebrate Professor Christensen's original theory and the new frontiers of innovation theory and application. Disruptors represent a new kind of billionaire - innovators who have the potential to help a billion people

Technology alone cannot solve the world's most intractable problems. We must learn to crawl up inside and shine a light on what makes people tick, said Christensen, Each year's crop of honorees help me refine and advance my thinking about disruptive innovation theory

Honorees receive the iconic red hammer as the official Disruptor Award, symbolic for both building new business models and smashing broken ones.

The 2016 Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Award honorees are as follows:

Thomas Heatherwick: Lifetime Achievement Award Honoree

Founder and Design Director, Heatherwick Studio

Thomas Heatherwick is a British designer whose prolific and varied work is characterized by its ingenuity, inventiveness and originality. He founded Heatherwick Studio in 1994 to bring design, architecture and urban planning together in a single workspace. Known for projects like the UK Pavilion at the Shanghai 2010 Expo, the cauldron for the 2012 London Olympics, and the Learning Hub at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, Heatherwick Studio is currently working in four continents on projects valued at over £2 billion. Thomas is a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, a Royal Academician and in 2004 became the youngest Royal Designer for Industry.

Richard Leakey: Lifetime Achievement Award Honoree

Chair, Kenya Wildlife Service and Founder & Chair, Turkana Basin Institute

Dr. Richard Leakey is currently a Professor of Anthropology at Stony Brook University, New York where he also serves as the Founder and Chair of the Turkana Basin Institute, a Kenya-based research facility that studies the history of life, past climate change and origins of humans. He is also Chairman of the Board of the Kenya Wildlife Service.

Formerly Director of Kenya's National Museums, Director of the Wildlife Conservation and Management Department, founding Director and Chairman of the Kenya Wildlife Service, Member of Parliament in Kenya and Head of the Public Service and Secretary to the Cabinet, Richard is now focused on funding the research institute at Turkana and working as Chair of the Kenya chapter of Transparency International and Founder of Wildlife Direct. Richard has played a key role in efforts to combat elephant and rhino poaching since the early 1990s, has actively campaigned for the protection of the Great Apes and he has become increasingly vocal about the threats to biodiversity ar

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