How a New York professor became an award-winning AI producer

^{A week in AI is like a year in other industries. I hope these issues become your weekly source of AI information, inspiration, and ideas. If we haven’t met before, I’m Amanda Smith. I write about AI and the fascinating folks who are building in this brave new world.}

Good morning. I’ve been covering AI for nearly two years and what I love about this space is how it cuts across all industries. AI builders go beyond big tech. The ones who do are some of my favorites, like this week’s founder. 

I’d never met an esteemed university professor who is also an award-winning AI producer. 

This one’s a real treat.

Subscribe | Past interviews | Advertise

🤝 This edition is brought to you by Airia

Ready to revolutionize your enterprise AI?

With Airia, you gain seamless AI management, from deployment to governance.

Overcome adoption barriers and maximize efficiency without compromising security or scalability.

Airia empowers innovation, makes AI actionable, and helps your business achieve more with less.

It’s time to redefine enterprise AI on your terms.

Start Exploring Airia

Founded: 1993 

Team size: A core team that includes writers, voice actors, editors, musicians, technologists, historians, cultural consultants, and Indigenous elders – plus university-based engineering teams through grants and partners. 

Funding to date: Grants, contributions, partnerships etc. 

ARR: Not disclosed 

Growth metric: Getting her multi-part, award-winning AI series on Amazon Prime.

Lynn Rogoff is a writer and producer, with an intentionally non-linear career across theatre, television, indie film, games, and now, AI. She’s developed stage plays, directed Emmy-winning documentaries, and created an edutainment adventure game. Owning original IP and having a sustained creative career was her goal. This means adapting to the times. 

Today, Rogoff’s pioneering AI in both storytelling and ed tech, as both a founder and professor (at the New York Institute of Technology). She’s created an award-winning magical realism series, Bird Woman: Sacajawea, using D-ID, Midjourney, Runway, Veo, and Sora. 

She’s also building interactive character chatbots for the series, allowing audiences to “chat” with Sacajawea and other explorers. Rogoff has a lot to say about operationalizing ethical AI, scaling from pilots to production, and bridging entertainment with education. 

Rogoff started experimenting with AI in 2023, initially to test whether emerging tools could support striking visuals, emotional nuance, and captivating performances. 

“I was developing Bird Woman: Sacajawea, a historically grounded, Indigenous-centered story-narrative that required visual scale, flexibility, and experimentation, but without a studio budget,” she explained. 

“In 2019, during Covid, we rewrote the screenplay first into an audio drama series and recorded it with actors, composers, and musicians. Then, we edited the dialogue, music, and sfx. After discovering AI tools, we developed the motion picture. Now for episodes 2 and 3, we’re using Kling, Sora, and Veo.”  

Rogoff explained AI offered a way to explore production workflows while keeping the human voice actors, historians, and Indigenous elders at the center. 

“We treated AI as part of the production pipeline, not the author. The focus was always on IP ownership, clean rights, and a multiple award-winning superhero adventure. That made it licensable. Episode 1 has won 12 international awards,” she shared. 

From there, the educational potential became obvious: if audiences could interact with historically grounded characters responsibly, storytelling could become participatory rather than passive.

Rogoff’s grant from the NYIT emerging technology grant propelled her to investigate leveraging AI in education. D-ID thought the work was a revolutionary use case for their platform, so gave the team unlimited use of their AI visual agent tech to generate lifelike digital humans and talking avatars. 

Testing was done on real users in educational settings. 

Our customers are the streaming platforms, cultural organizations, and educational institutions looking for distinctive, mission-driven content with clean rights. Acquisition is relationship-driven: festivals, industry conversations, press, platform introductions, and increasingly inbound interest based on existing distribution and awards. 

There are two paths to profit: 

“Revenue to date has been modest but validating; the value lies in the IP, distribution, and demand. We’re focused on long-term IP value rather than short-term scale. Demand and traction are validated through distribution, awards, and institutional adoption,” she explained. 

The company has been built primarily through project-based funding grants, in-kind contributions, seed money partnerships, and institutional support. Rogoff said she’s focused on shifting from one-off deals to structured, repeatable, and revenue rather than traditional venture funding. 

Rogoff believes we’ll need more creatives but with broader skillsets. “AI doesn’t remove the need for writers, directors or engineers; it raises the bar for human judgement, creativity, originality, ethics, taste, and leadership.” 

Entertainment will become more interactive and more dependent on those who understand how to prompt engineers and build worlds that last, not just content that trends. 

“AI video-enhanced motion pictures are a new genre of filmmaking.” 

As always, hit reply if something in here hits home.

Speak soon,
Amanda

P.S. If you want to get a founder feature about your own story, reply to this email. If you’d like to reach our newsletter audience (founders, creators, and marketers), click the button below.

If you’re new here, I’m over the moon you’ve joined us! To help me craft content that’s actually useful (and not just noise in your inbox), I’d love it if you took 1 minute to answer this quick survey below. Your insights help shape everything I write.

Dive into our other newsletters - where psychology meets the creator economy, e-commerce marketing, and Human resources.