tl;dr Matthew Manos is a Los Angeles-based entrepreneur, educator, and strategist passionate about creativity and innovation. 🙋‍♂️

Once called “crazy or genius” by Forbes Magazine, Matthew Manos is a visionary entrepreneur, educator, and strategist specializing in ideation, foresight, and planning. His clients and collaborators have included the American Heart Association, Apple, the City of Los Angeles, Disney Imagineering, Google, Mattel, and UNICEF.

Matthew is an Associate Professor at the USC Jimmy Iovine and Andre “Dr. Dre” Young Academy, a school that brings together the arts, technology, and business in order to address real-world challenges. There, his teaching focuses on design-driven innovation in both client-facing and entrepreneurial contexts. As Associate Dean, Matthew oversees curriculum design and delivery across all undergraduate and graduate degree programs. Through prior leadership roles within the school, he helped codify its learning model and led initiatives related to academic advising and admissions. Prior to his current appointment with USC, Matthew held various teaching positions spanning design and entrepreneurship at ArtCenter College of Design, CCA’s Design Strategy MBA, CalArts, the Strelka Institute in Moscow, and UCLA’s Design Media Arts program. 

Matthew also advises the Iovine and Young Education Group on K-12 curriculum design and teacher training for new schools, course pathways, and afterschool programs across the United States. With Apple Education, he designed and facilitated teacher training on creativity and futures thinking for 690 K-12 schools spanning 36 countries. 

In 2008, Matthew launched verynice, the first social enterprise in the design services industry. Driven by a mission to alleviate expenses for non-profits, verynice’s unique “give-half” pro-bono model was able to successfully offset over $60,000,000 in professional service fees for 1,500+ organizations across the globe. verynice’s work lives on through its publishing house, Reginald, which curates an extensive collection of pay-what-you-want toolkits that offer frameworks and methodologies for creative problem-solving that have been used by over 200,000 people from 175 countries.

Matthew has delivered lectures and workshops at more than 250 events across 20 countries, including two TEDx talks, with collaborators and hosts ranging from the AIGA and the National Endowment for the Arts to Singularity University and SXSW EDU. His work has been featured in outlets including Entrepreneur, Fast Company, Forbes, GOOD, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired. He is the author of two books, How to Give Half of Your Work Away for Free and Toward a Preemptive Social Enterprise, and has also authored or edited more than 35 design and strategy toolkits.

Through the COVID-19 pandemic, Matthew served as the inaugural Chair of Mayor Garcetti's Creative Advisory Board. In conjunction with this appointment, Matthew was part of the founding team that launched LA Optimized, a multi-million dollar pandemic response program designed to connect creatives with over 1,000 small businesses in need of services to expand their online presence. 

Matthew holds an MFA in Media Design Practices from the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, and a BA in Design Media Arts from UCLA.