Johanna Blakley

Johanna Blakley

Johanna is the managing director at the Norman Lear Center, a research and public policy institute that explores the convergence of entertainment, commerce and society. Based at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, Johanna performs research on a wide variety of topics, including media impact measurement, cultural diplomacy and politics and entertainment. She has two talks on TED.com and speaks frequently in the U.S. and abroad about her research. Johanna is co-principal investigator, with Marty Kaplan, on the Media Impact Project (MIP), a hub for collecting, developing and sharing approaches for measuring the impact of media. MIP seeks to better understand the role that media plays in changing knowledge, attitudes and behavior among individuals and communities around the world. 

Johanna’s recent work includes national and international surveys on the relationship between political ideology and entertainment preferences, and she is currently examining the impact of narrative ingredients of scripted TV shows on viewers. She received a PhD in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she taught courses on popular culture; at USC, she developed and taught masters courses on transmedia storytelling. Before arriving at the Lear Center, Johanna held a variety of positions within the high-tech industry, including Web producer and digital archivist at Vivendi-Universal Games.
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