Seminars and Workshops

As a senior fellow at Columbia University School of the Arts, Frank heads two distinct initiatives. In 2014 he started the executive education seminar Strategic Storytelling, presented by the School of the Arts’ Digital Storytelling Lab, and he is the DSL’s awards director, having started the Breakthroughs in Storytelling awards in 2016. He also leads private seminars and workshops for corporate and institutional clients and consults for select clients on brand identity issues.

Strategic Storytelling at Columbia

Stories are how we explain and make sense of the world. They appeal primarily to the emotions—and yet cognitive scientists have shown that they are more effective at reaching people than rational arguments. To communicate effectively we need to view the world in narrative terms, not as a thesis to be argued or a pitch to be made but as a story to be told. This is the essence of “narrative thinking.”

About the Strategic Storytelling program

Strategic Storytelling is an executive education seminar that shows how stories are used by leading brands, entertainment industry professionals, B2B providers and nonprofits—and what each of these can learn from the other. Participants have come from such organizations as AB Inbev, Airbnb, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Coca-Cola, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Raytheon, Rio Tinto, Salesforce, Accenture, McKinsey, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Doctors without Borders, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Jane Goodall Institute, the Presidential Diwan of the United Arab Emirates, the Saudi Industrial Development Fund, the United States Army and the World Bank.

Strategic Storytelling is currently on hiatus. For more information, please contact Frank.

Academic Symposia and Master Classes

In addition to his Columbia seminar, Frank leads workshops and master classes and takes part in conferences at academic institutions. To learn more, please contact Frank directly.

Co-organizer and speaker
Cooper Hewitt-Columbia DSL Storytelling Salon
Cooper Hewitt,
Smithsonian Design Museum
New York, March 28, 2017

Private Workshops and Consulting

Frank leads private workshops tailored to the needs of select corporate and institutional clients. He also consults with agencies and their clients on brand identity issues: brand purpose, brand promise, brand narrative and brand voice. To see how this might work for you, please contact Frank.

Brand positioning and story creation for Siili Solutions, the Helsinki-based technology platform
November 2017-January 2018

“Embracing Analog:
Why Physical Is Hot”
Co-author of a survey and trend report on attitudes about digital v. physical for JWT Intelligence
March 2013

Keynote speaker
Johnson & Johnson Content Strategy Immersion workshop
IPG/Ensemble
Los Angeles, August 1, 2011

Columbia Digital Storytelling Lab

The Digital Storytelling Lab at Columbia University School of the Arts is a next-generation media lab harnessing the arts, humanities and emergent technologies to tackle some of the world’s impossible problems through collaboration, experimentation, exploration and creativity.

Led by founding director Lance Weiler, Columbia DSL designs stories for the 21st century, building on a diverse range of creative and research practices while never losing sight of the power of a good story. It is a place of speculation, creativity, and collaboration between students and faculty from across the University. We tell stories here in fresh and unexpected ways.

Columbia DSL’s Breakthroughs in Storytelling Awards

The DSL’s annual Breakthroughs in Storytelling awards celebrate the past year’s most innovative approaches to narrative. Developed by Frank to spur creativity and expand the Lab’s educational mission, the awards honor 12 signal achievements—the finalists who comprise the “Digital Dozen.” Out of these, the Breakthrough Prize goes to the project in any field that best exemplifies the spirit of inventiveness at work today, while the Special Jury Prize is given at the discretion of the awards committee. The awards aim to further digital media’s potential to break free of rigid, industrial-age classifications and evolve in ways that analog media could not. Winners are chosen by an interdisciplinary jury of Lab members and university faculty and announced every spring.

Winners of the 2024 Breakthroughs in Storytelling Awards will be announced online at 6:30 PM Eastern Time on Wednesday, November 13. You’re invited! RSVP here.

Past recipients of Columbia DSL’s Breakthrough Award include:

2023: Dreamachine

Inspired by a stroboscopic device invented at the “Beat Hotel” in Paris in 1959, Dreamachine generates an intense visual experience that takes place behind closed eyes, completely unique to each individual.

2022: Life After BOB: The Chalice Study

What would happen if a mad scientist implanted his daughter with an AI at birth? Ian Cheng’s game-engine-driven anime combines a computer simulation with scripted storytelling.

2021: Darkfield Radio

In response to the pandemic, David Rosenberg and Glen Neath of London’s Darkfield immersed audiences in strange worlds in their own homes, bringing new meaning to the familiar spaces we inhabit.

2020: Facial Recognition Machine

Using off-the-shelf technology, Sahil Chinoy of The New York Times dramatically highlighted facial recognition’s threat to individual freedom.