Zach Verdin is a fourth-generation Los Angeles Jew born on Texas soil who now lives in Tennessee. Guiding all of his work is a theory of power that centers on American culture and its role in transforming society. He is the executive director of Knowledge Futures, founded in 2018 at MIT with a mission to make information useful.
In his work as a producer, Verdin is focused on a similar mission: developing America’s cultural infrastructure. Recognized for his provocative approach to creative content, he helps mobilize independent artists by connecting them to networks, spaces, and resources and by investing directly in their projects and businesses. One of his first ventures in this field was NewHive, a multimedia publishing platform and international community for internet art with millions of users worldwide, which he co-founded in 2009. Today, Verdin is the founding partner at Parable, an entertainment company launched in 2024 to invest in sacred American stories and the people who tell them. Many of Parable’s initiatives bridge the new-media and entertainment sectors, like Doomscroll, a political talk show created and hosted by the online-culture critic and artist Joshua Citarella. At its core, Parable invests in narrative films and documentaries about the multifarious experience of life in the United States, including The Brutalist, winner of the 2024 Golden Globe awards for best drama and best director (Brady Corbet).
In his efforts to activate existing communities and cultivate new ones, Verdin elevates individuals whose visionary work is rooted in their unique geography. He is one of the founding partners of IWR, a brand creating "propaganda you can believe in", and of New Era Americans (NEA), a media company that discovers the people creating the new American dream. He also sits on the Board of Directors at Institute 193, founded in 2009 and based in Lexington, Kentucky, which collaborates with artists, musicians, and writers to document the cultural landscape of the modern South.
Since 2017 much of Verdin’s work has focused on the flow of ideas in highly contested digital spaces. The proliferation of antidemocratic hazards, and their impact on geopolitical groups, Fortune 100 companies, and civil society, remains a key issue in his work.
Verdin’s work has been covered in a range of media outlets, including The New York Times, Bloomberg, Buzzfeed, Fast Company, The Verge, and Rolling Stone. He was also the subject of a 2018 QAnon drop accusing him of being part of the Silicon Valley Illuminati.
