John S. Johnson

John Johnson is a media entrepreneur, a research scientist studying media, behavior, and society. He co-founded BuzzFeed and served as Chairperson, and he currently guides Harmony Labs as Founder and Chairman. Under Johnson’s direction, Harmony Labs has conducted pioneering research on media influence and more recently added an incubator and creative studio to explore and experiment with the social effects of media. Earlier in his career, Johnson founded the art and technology lab EYEbeam, whose Contagious Media Lab was the precursor to BuzzFeed.

He also founded the Screenwriters Colony residency program, was a founding investor in The Huffington Post, and is Publisher of La Voz de Guanacaste, a Costa Rican investigative news organization. John is a Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute and the co-author of research publications in the fields of communications, information technology, and sociology. He is a trustee of the Atlantic Foundation based in Hamilton, NJ from which he gives more than $3M in grants each year to organizations that leverage the power of art, science and technology to examine and address social and environmental issues.