Diana Rhoten

Diana Rhoten is co-founder and co-director of Startl, an organization dedicated to accelerating the growth, development and distribution of digital innovations for learning from kindergarten to college – inside and outside the classroom.

Startl seeks to nurture talent, stimulate alternative modes of production and open up new avenues and venues that create big audiences for small projects by recruiting young innovators, immersing them in a rigorous product design and development process, and helping them to build socially responsible and fiscally sustainable start-ups.

Diana has worked extensively on the design, implementation, and assessment of new organizational strategies and structures. She’s currently leading a dozen New York City institutions — including the New York Public Library, American Museum of Natural History, Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum, Museo del Barrio, and MTV — through an adaptive design and change process. In addition to coaching twenty institutional representatives, she manages a dozen media designers, technologists, researchers and graduate students. In just ten weeks, this team produced Mannahatta, a location-based game for mobile devices that maps Manhattan’s historical ecosystem onto the modern grid of the city’s streets.

Holder of a Ph.D. in international development and education and an M.A. in sociology from Stanford, an M.Ed. from Harvard and a B.A. from Brown, Diana has published in journals including Science, Minerva and Thesis Eleven, and has been featured in The New York Times, Nature and The Chronicle of Higher Education. For her theoretical contributions and practical applications in the area of organizational design and innovation, Diana was named a Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer, an award that honors individuals at the leading edge of science.