About
Within a burgeoning movement to address “climate silence” in popular culture, Global Rise: Stories for the Future embraces the complexity required to power new ideas and imagination across genres, platforms, generations, and cultures.
As educators and artists, we infuse our workshops with storytelling craft, science communication expertise, audience development, and strategies to cultivate new language around technology and storytelling.
We apply systems thinking, which can be geopolitical in scale, yet can also be used in our daily lives. Ultimately, we build creative communities rooted in social justice goals for an interdependent global culture of care.
Team
Jessie Keyt is a writer, film scholar, and international story consultant. She co-authored Alternative Scriptwriting: Contemporary Storytelling for the Screen and is the Head of Screenwriting and an Associate Arts Professor at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, where she teaches a graduate-level master class on “Writing the Climate Change Script.” She holds MFAs in Writing from Columbia University and NYU and has taught climate storytelling for Sundance, the Torino Film Lab, and the Venice Biennale.
Jessie Keyt
Lydia Dean Pilcher is a filmmaker, cultural strategist, and two-time emmy-winning, academy award-nominated producer of over 40 feature films and series. Her NYC-based production company, Cine Mosaic, works with international partners to create independent spirited film & tv. Pilcher works with studios, unions, and UN Climate Change to foster clean energy transitions and climate-themed storytelling. She was awarded the 2026 PGA Entrepreneurial Spirit Producing Award.
At the Columbia University Climate School, she teaches Climatic Change: Storytelling Arts, Zeitgeist and Our Future, an interdisciplinary graduate course to explore climate solutions in complex stories for film, television, and creative writing. She holds an MFA in Film & Television, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and a BA in Political Science and Communications.
Lydia Dean Pilcher
Abby Rabinowitz is a STEM communications expert and journalist. Abby directs the writing program at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, where her courses include an advanced research seminar, "Climate Fiction and the City." Abby has written on climate change policy, technology, and narratives for Wired, The Columbia Journalism Review, Grist, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Guardian, BuzzFeed and Vice, among other publications. Prior to joining NYU, Abby taught writing at Columbia University, where she helped found Neuwrite, Columbia’s association of writers and scientists. She is a recipient of a Fulbright Grant and holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction, Columbia University School of the Arts and a BA in History from Brown University.