DANIELA KON | Founder + Executive Director
Daniela Kon is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, producer and consultant working at the intersection of human rights, global development and impact media for close to two decades. Born in Frankfurt, Germany, she completed her BA in Media and Cultural Studies and MA in Documentary Production at The London College of Communications and Royal Holloway, University of London. She moved to New York in 2003 working for Emmy award-winning director Marc Levin at Blowback Productions, and was the researcher and assistant editor for HBO and THINK Film’s “Protocols of Zion,” an Official Sundance Selection. She founded impact agency, DEEDA, in 2005 and has since worked with filmmakers, NGOs and aid organizations in Cambodia, Thailand, India, Bangladesh, Israel, Liberia, Senegal, and the US, creating documentaries and impact campaigns on a plethora of social justice issues. Her film credits range from the award winning documentary TALIBE, the United Nations FAO Ending Hunger Campaign and the UN Global Conference on Agricultural Research for Development (GCARD), to collaborations with grassroots initiatives in Education, Voluntourism, Youth Leadership, Girls and Women’s Empowerment, LGBT Rights, Water Management, Children’s Rights, and Modern-day Slavery. Daniela is a board member of the HRW Film Committee and the Women’s Rights Committee of Human Rights Watch in Los Angeles, a producer and strategist for social issue media productions and international advocacy campaigns. Driven by the premise of maximizing responsible impact through creativity, she founded SIMA and the Social Impact Media Awards in 2012, dedicated to advancing the culture of impact filmmaking and to supporting filmmakers and change-makers in their work. Living and working in Los Angeles, Daniela has expanded SIMA’s operations into fiscal sponsorship and global impact distribution via SIMA Studios, bringing social impact films to over 70,000 students and 5 million viewers in over 40 countries per year. Today, SIMA is the largest network of social impact creatives with the broadest global footprint, leveraging the power of impact film to advance education and empower engagement for social change from the grassroots level and up.