Welcome
I’m an artist, filmmaker and author. I started writing my newsletter Breakfast @ Tiffany’s 29 years ago when I first started the Webby Awards. I share what I am thinking about and working on, as well as a curated monthly list of 20 to 30 art shows, films, books, podcasts, and things I think you will find interesting. In many ways it carries on the spirit of the Webby Awards by shining a light on work I love. It’s always free but if you want to support my efforts with my long-time editor Jenny Traig in creating this newsletter of monthly offerings, we would LOVE that. It takes a lot of work and everyone on my small but mighty team here at Let it Ripple gets paid, so it would be wonderful if you could help with that by subscribing. All subscribers will also join me on a Zoom 2x a year where you can ask me anything. The first zoom will be on June 3rd at 10am PT/ 1pm ET. I’m very happy to now finally be here on Substack.
xo, Tiffany
ART
I will also be sharing my artwork here. Below is an image with my sculpture and moveable monument, Dendrofemonology: A Feminist History Tree Ring. You can check out a 8-min film my thinking behind it and where we are today in feminist history here. I know I look so serious in that shot below; it’s because in artist shots, you are supposed to look serious. But if you know me, I love to laugh and am often smiling.
FILMS
Okay, here’s me below in my natural state, smiling. I’ve been making films since I was at UC Berkeley as an interdisciplinary studies major. They didn’t have a film department there, so we borrowed 16mm cameras from the anthropology department and editing systems from city planning. I loved it.
Most of my early films were editing together other old movies. I eventually went to a summer program at NYU while an undergrad, and have been making films ever since. The creative constraint of learning how to make films in that scrapy way very much informs my collage style of filmmaking. I have made over 33 films in my career. I love the short form because it’s the ultimate creative challenge to take a complicated subject and try to distill it down in an accessible way. In my films I explore topics ranging from philosophy, feminism, neuroscience, technology, Jewish identity and ideas around creativity. I selected a few here if you want to check out my work, then they all live over at on my site.
My Sundance feature documentary Connected: An Autoblogography about Love, Death & Technology came out in 2011 and it’s a great place to start.
I’ve been making feminist films and films for planned parenthood since I started my career. Here is Life, Liberty & The Pursuit of Happiness that premiered at Sundance in 2003. I wish it wasn’t so relevant today.
I had the most fun making my original series The Future Starts Here in 2013 & 2014. That is what the photo above is from. We were given a budget upfront (that never happens) and it ran for two seasons, was nominated for an Emmy Award and was viewed over 40 million times. It was . Of that show, check out the episodes, Technology Shabbats, A Case for Dreaming, and The Future of Our Species.
More recent films include The Teen Brain, on the neuroscience of adolescence, executive produced by Goldie Hawn and Mindup. It’s 10 minutes long because we made it for teens. And then there’s my 8 min film We Are Here about my artwork Dendrofemonology.
BOOKS
I have written two books so far. The first one I would call a booklet, since it was for the TED conference and they wanted them short like their talks. The book actually started as a 10 minute film I made called Brain Power: From Neurons to Networks.
What I consider my first official book was published by Simon & Schuster’s Gallery Books in 2019. It is 24/6: Giving Up Screens One Day a Week To Get More Time, Creativity and Connection. It explores my practice of turning off screens one day week based on the ancient Jewish idea of Shabbat and goes deep into the history of time on and off in society. It also looks at the neuroscience explaining why I feel most creative on Saturdays, and shares how to bring this practice into your life. I have now done this practice for 15 years and it gives me great pleasure to hear from readers how much it’s made their life better. We have created a society that expects and demands being on 24/7. 24/6 draws on an idea that has withstood thousands of years: the importance of one day of rest.
TALKS
By the way, I am noticing a color theme here. As a working artist, there are several different ways that I make a living. I wish people were more transparent about how it takes multiple different things to make it all work. I give talks on all of the subjects above and get paid for them.Since I narrate my films, my talks are like live movies in many ways since I use a lot of images and animations from my films to take ideas further, in front of a live audience. (You can see all the subjects of my talks and a 1-min reel of highlights here.) I once took this idea all to the next level in the form of a performance I called “Spoken Cinema” at MoMA in New York. It really was like a live documentary on stage. There was a soundtrack and audience participation, and it brought a lot of elements I had experimented with early on for the Webby Awards when productions were at venues like the SF Opera House. The audience really became part of the experience. That show only happened once. It was a career highlight with sold-out audience and standing ovation. It was truly something I had always wanted to do and it was exhilarating to bring all work into one experience. It premiered weeks before the COVID shut down in 2020. Someday I will do it again.
THE CENTER OF IT ALL
My center is my husband Ken Goldberg and our daughters Odessa and Blooma and our animals. Ken is a robotics professor at UC Berkeley and an artist. We have been together for 28 years. As a child of divorce, this feels important to say since I think it all means more when you know the absence of it. We work independently on our artwork and projects and then every several years we collaborate on co-writing a film like The Tribe, or an art installation. In 2022 a fantastic curator reached out to us to come together to create an exhibition for the Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide initiative for the Skirball Cultural Center. Making this museum exhibition Ancient Wisdom for a Future Ecology: Trees, Time & Technology was our most complex project to date and such an incredible experience There are 10 artworks in the show including eight tree ring timelines that we co-wrote, artificial intelligence, a video art piece, and an interactive component. It just finished a five-month run in LA and will be traveling to San Francisco to di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art’s stunning new location in Minnesota Street Project, opening Jan 20th, 2026.
Our daughters Odessa and Blooma, and our animals Rosalind Franklin aka “Rosie”
and our rescue Bombay cat Midnight (it’s hard to get her in a family shot),
keep me laughing through all the craziness of life, especially right now in our country and world.
So that’s who I am. I did not expect this “About” page to be so long, but I wanted to share who was writing to you in these monthly missives. At this moment, March 2025.
