Amar C. Bakshi — founder, artist, and social innovator
I design new ways for people to connect across difference.
Human connection across difference is essential to our personal, professional, and political lives. It expands what we can imagine, helps diverse teams think and decide more creatively, and makes pluralistic democracy possible.
Two forces are testing it at once. AI systems increasingly stand in for human relationships, and deepening polarization makes shared worlds harder to build.
I am working on three responses, each at a different scale.
Groups
Founding Co-Lead
A translational research initiative at the MIT Center for Constructive Communication, bringing practitioners and researchers together to explore and prototype new forms of gathering, deliberation, creativity, and collective action.
Organizations
Co-Founder
A product studio and consultancy that helps organizations redesign roles, teams, and decision-making for a world with AI agents on the team.
Societies
Partner
A special-projects studio for democracy, incubating and launching initiatives designed to stem the authoritarian tide and help build a stronger shared political future in America.
Foundational initiative · 2014–present
Shared Studios began by bringing a million strangers face-to-face.
I started Shared Studios in 2014 as an art project connecting strangers in Tehran and New York. I painted a shipping container gold and connected it to an identical room across the world. People entered alone and came face-to-face, life-size, with a stranger somewhere else. One visitor in New York, after speaking with a stranger in Tehran, wrote in the gold book: “Amazing how the first moments and awkwardness gave ground to joy — the technology and the opportunity to share a moment of connection across continents.”
PBS documentary · 26 min
Passion Projects: The Portal
It seems like you're standing right in front of me. It's an amazing technology, but it also represents what this summit's all about, which is young people from all around the world coming up with new ideas and making those ideas a reality.
Barack Obama
This is an amazing experience. Really works as art but as cultural diplomacy as well. Bravo!
Fareed Zakaria · Author and CNN host
Truly amazing. If you do nothing else I ever ask you to do, just do this.
Samantha Power
The work continues
Co-Founder, Inventor & Advisor
Noro carries this exploration of presence across distance into the permanent built environment—workplaces and schools.
We build life-size video walls that put distant colleagues in the same room, restoring the eye contact, body language, and spontaneous encounters that conventional video calls leave out.
Noro’s technology will be critical to the future of work. If meeting in-person is a 10/10, and Zoom and Teams is a 4/10, Noro is an 8/10 — almost like the real thing.
Nick Bloom · Professor, Stanford University
Other work
I have pursued the same underlying question—how we forge meaningful human connection across difference—through journalism, public service, law, and art.
Media Diet
Co-Creator
An art exhibition that makes visible how the information we consume shapes what we see, believe, and share.
Whose Future
Co-Founder
A public technology garage where people can experiment and build with emerging tools.
The Legal Medium
Founder
A symposium and multi-year inquiry into how artists use law itself as a creative material.
CNN Global Public Square
Managing Editor
I worked with Fareed Zakaria on CNN's global analysis and launched the digital series Uncommon Ground.
United States Mission to the United Nations
Special Assistant
I worked for Ambassador Susan Rice, including on the U.S. response to the H1N1 pandemic.
The Washington Post
Reporter
I reported How the World Sees America and covered race and identity during the 2008 presidential campaign.
Promoting Local Culture to Repress Dissent
Researcher and Author
My Harvard senior thesis examined how Zimbabwe's Information Ministry funded musicians, filmmakers, and theater companies—including its own fiercest critics—as an instrument of control.
On designing social worlds
Well-designed environments can reveal our common humanity.
People are better than their information environments. Put almost anyone in a well-designed room with someone they were told to fear, and within twenty minutes they are talking about their kids, their music, what would make today a good day.Read the essay →
Partners and clients
Covered by
- Education
- Harvard University, AB — the first joint concentration in Social Studies and Visual and Environmental Studies Johns Hopkins SAIS, MA — International Economics Yale Law School, JD
- Recognition and affiliations
- Truman Scholar Soros Scholar Fellow, Johns Hopkins SNF Agora Institute
- Board service
- Director, Refounding America — a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) working on the structure and function of the national government. Leading the design of its community engagement. Board of Governors, St. Albans School
- Talks and patents
- Seventeen talks, four of them recorded, and nine U.S. patents behind the Portal
See all →
Ways to work together
Talks and conversations
Keynotes and moderated conversations for conferences, festivals, and leadership offsites—and, where the room allows, a talk built around a live installation rather than a slide deck.
Organizational experiments
A custom gathering, prototype, or new social form designed around a live challenge involving technology, culture, collaboration, or difference.
Public installations
Participatory and immersive environments that allow people to encounter a question—and one another—in a new way.
Advising and governance
Longer-term collaboration with leaders and institutions navigating technology, pluralism, organizational culture, and public life.