David Ambrose is a co-founder of Art Not War and has spent the past 15 years producing and directing. He oversees all production, post-producing, analytics and social listening for Art Not War’s content.

His works have earned over two hundred million online views, 6 Pollies, 3 Reed Awards, and hundreds of millions of dollars of earned media through worldwide news coverage. In 2009 David executive produced the feature film, Monogamy, winner of Best Narrative at the Tribeca Film Festival. In 2015 David directed Upworthy’s most popular piece of original content, Pay It Forward Pizza which earned over 50 million views. In 2016 he produced and co-directed the feature documentary that predicted the outcome of the presidential election based upon voter suppression. The film has been screened in 80 cities and cited in lawsuits by the ACLU, Common Cause, and League of Women Voters. Currently, David is an entrepreneur in residence at Civic Hall in New York where he is developing a video sharing platform for crowdsourcing video stories called Onstack.

Laura Dawn is a cultural campaign strategist, digital strategist, director, writer, producer, and branding expert. As the the former Creative & Cultural Director of MoveOn.org and current Founder, CEO & Chief Creative for cultural strategy firm ART NOT WAR, Laura has spent the last decade leading groundbreaking cultural campaigns and making impact media, achieving over 500 million online views of her direct work and hundreds of millions of dollars of earned media for her clients.

Laura served as the Creative & Cultural Director of MoveOn.org from 2003 – 2011. Her work as part of the original staff of 7 helped to grow the organization from 500,000 members into an eight million-member progressive powerhouse. Her forte is viral content creation, digital organizing, and high-level strategic collaborations between renowned artists and grassroots activists that help not-for-profits garner earned media, bolster public awareness and spur action for social change.

In the past three years, Laura Dawn has directed over 75 online videos and mini-docs,  won 11 Pollies, winning the coveted “Best in Show” Pollie Award for 2012 Ad of the Year for her expose on child trafficking, “Backpage.com’. In the past 14 years, Laura has served as producer and creative director for over 500 media pieces, produced two documentary features, and directed/produced a short documentary on the first transgender sprint car driver. 

In 2016,  Laura created and served as Executive Director for Humanity for Hillary, a social media campaign that within three months had an online audience reach of 275 million, 1.2 billion media impressions, with videos and memes viewed more than 50 million times.  She currently serves on the Advisory Board for The Climate Mobilization and The Hometown Project.  

Awarded the Paul Wellstone Citizen Leadership Award of 2004 for the 2004 Staff of MoveOn.org, articles on Laura Dawn & her work as an activist have been featured in Vogue, LA Weekly, the NY Times, Village Voice, Time magazine, Salon, & USA Today. Laura has been a speaker and panelist on the merger of artists and online activism at the Venice Biennale, the Guggenheim Museum, Tokion, the Sundance Film Festival, Carnegie Hall, & many others. She has two political ads in the Museum of the Moving Image and one induction into the 2012 Political Ad Hall of Fame from ABC/ CLIO.

For the past two decades, Daron Murphy has brought his skills as a writer, composer, musician, and producer to the creation of cutting edge content in almost every form of media, from film, television, and radio to print and online publishing to recording and live performance across the world.

Daron co-founded ART NOT WAR in December, 2011 after two years as principal of the creative and production team responsible for all television, radio, and online video content for MoveOn.org, one of history’s largest and most successful progressive advocacy groups. His work builds on a decade’s experience writing scripts, producing video, and composing original music for groups like Avaaz, Color of Change, Moms Rising, Rebuild the Dream, The ACLU, SEIU and many more.

Daron is the former research chief for the Condé Nast’s Men’s Vogue. As a journalist and editor, Daron’s contributed writing and reporting to publications like The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Businessweek, I.D., Entertainment Weekly, and Vibe. And as a composer, Daron’s created and performed original scores for feature documentaries like Henry Louis Gates Jr’s Black America Since MLK: And Still I Rise, Vanessa Hope’s All Eyes and Ears, Naomi Wolf’s The End of America, short films like Julia Stiles’ Raving, starring Zooey Deschanel, and television advocacy spots like VoteVets.org’s “Bring Them Home,” directed by Oliver Stone.

In 2006, after spending a year touring the world as guitarist for electronic music icon, Moby, Daron founded a music production company, Gowanus Sound Initiative, creating original scores for commercial clients like Expedia, UPS, and Converse. As a live performer, he’s shared the stage with Lou Reed, Public Enemy’s Chuck D., Jane’s Addiction’s Perry Farrell, Kris Kristofferson, Bettye Lavette, the B-52’s, Rufus Wainwright, Norah Jones, and Donovan. And his rock band, the Little Death, has been praised by such luminaries as David Lynch, who invited the group–along with Sheryl Crow and Eddie Vedder–to share the bill with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr at the 2009 “Change Begins Within” benefit concert at Radio Music Hall.

Before Daron entered the world of progressive politics and professional music, he spent five years as a founding editor and multimedia producer at Word.com, one of the earliest and most influential online magazines. The site was called “iconoclastic” by Wired and “the best magazine on the web” by The Wall Street Journal. By the time of its dissolution in 2000, Daron had participated in the creation of Word’s Webby-nominated online videogame (Sissyfight 2000) and co-edited the site’s critically acclaimed book (Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs), excerpted in The New Yorker and called “amazing” by USA Today.