Cooper Hewitt says...
Jennifer 8. Lee is a journalist, author, producer, and emoji activist, founder of Emojination and Emojicon and CEO of Plympton, a literary studio. She graduated from Harvard University in 1999 with a B.A. in Applied Math and Economics and completed a fellowship in International Relations at Beijing University in 2000. Lee was a full-time reporter for The New York Times from 2000-09, where she won three Publishers Awards and coined the term “man date.” Following her departure, she served as the lead judge of Knight News Challenge, a program that awards and funds innovative ideas for news coverage. Lee authored "The Fortune Cookie Chronicles" (2008), which was on the New York Times bestseller list and produced “The Search of General Tso” that premiered at Tribeca Film Festival in 2014. She is a board member on several literary organizations, including the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards, Google News Lab, Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation, and Asian American Writer’s Workshop. Lee is a member of the Unicode Consortium Emoji Subcommittee and, since 2017, is Vice Chair of the subcommittee. She advocates for the diversification of emoji and has co-authored numerous proposals, including Dumpling, Person With Headscarf, and Inter-skintone Couple. In 2018, she was recognized as Fast Company 100 People in Business for her emoji work.
