Category Archives: People

 I recently had the chance to chat with Michael Preston, Executive Director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, for a new episode of the Designing for Children’s Best podcast, produced by the Designing for Children’s Rights Association. The result was an inspiring conversation between Michael and myself, Polina Lulu, regarding one of Michael’s recent talks, “Building a Positive Digital Future for Kids, with Kids—Together.” We dove into each of the title words individually and in relation to…

Lloyd Morrisett (November 2, 1929 – January 15, 2023) was the co-founder of Sesame Street and Children’s Television Workshop, and a founding board member of both the Workshop and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center. It is hard to overstate the value of his clear vision, his wise leadership, and his enduring impact on children and families, public media, and society at large. Today we honor him by inviting individuals who knew him well or worked with him to share a…

When I met Michael Levine outside a conference at UPenn in 2012, I had no idea how much that conversation would shape my career. From my earliest visits to the Joan Ganz Cooney Center office, I was struck by the infectious sense of purpose and energy there. Starting in 2013, I had the good fortune to partner with Michael, Lori Takeuchi, and the JGCC team in a multi-year research project to understand how initiatives to advance digital equity were influencing…

I first learned about the Joan Ganz Cooney Center when I was working with Sesame Workshop’s research team as a graduate student. I was able to join Lori Takeuchi, who was the research director at the time, for fieldwork in Queens on a Cooney-Center study about young children’s perceptions of technology. The questions we asked during our interviews that day revealed that kids in 2010 didn’t differentiate between telephones, smartphones, flip phones, cameras, music players, and gaming devices. At that…

It’s hard to believe 15 years have gone by since the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop launched. Due to the visionary force of nature that is Michael Levine, the Center swiftly earned its reputation for being an organization that serves as a nexus between research, policy, and practice in children’s learning and media. It also quickly became known as a launchpad for emerging scholars, entrepreneurs, and multi-sector leaders committed to advancing kids’ learning through media. I joined Sesame…

During my junior year of college, I came across the Cooney Center while looking for potential internship opportunities. To be clear, they hadn’t posted an internship, but I just knew I had to get in. After pestering Lori Takeuchi, I wore her down and I became an undergrad intern during the summer of 2012. It was worth the pestering. After spending just a few days in the corner of the Workshop that housed the Cooney Center, it was obvious that…

It was December 2013. I was finishing my master’s program in Media Design for Learning at NYU when one of my professors told me about a position at Sesame Workshop that, according to him, had my name all over it. Soon, three more people shared the same position with me, saying it “would be a perfect fit.” The position was for a bilingual qualitative researcher with professional experience working with young children to work on the Families and Media Initiative…

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center and Sesame Workshop mourn the passing of our esteemed and beloved co-founder Lloyd N. Morrisett, PhD, who died at the age of 93. Lloyd leaves an outsized and indelible legacy among generations of children the world over, with Sesame Street only the most visible tribute to a lifetime of good work and lasting impact. An experimental psychologist by training, Lloyd was a Vice President of the Carnegie Corporation of New York when he posed the…

Jason Yip was a Cooney Center Fellow from 2013-2014 and remains a frequent collaborator through his work with KidsTeam UW. My time at the Cooney Center (2013 – 2014) came immediately after a stint as a doctoral student at the University of Maryland (UMD). At the time, I was completing my PhD in curriculum and instruction in science education, with some work in child-computer interaction. While I had a lot of projects at UMD (such as investigating the way children…

Jenny Ng was at the Cooney Center as an administrative coordinator in 2019. She’s currently a project manager at Noggin.   I am a mom to three young children and a proud alumna of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center! I had the great opportunity to join the team in June 2019. Although I am no longer at Sesame Workshop, it was a pivotal moment in restarting my career growth and in reigniting my sense of self within a team –…