tl;dr Matthew Manos is a Los Angeles-based professor and strategist passionate about bringing play to serious conversations. 🙋‍♂️

Once called “crazy or genius” by Forbes Magazine, Matthew Manos is the Founder and Managing Director of verynice. verynice collaborates with organizations to bring clarity to creative, strategic, or existential challenges with a unique blend of play and practicality. Since 2008, verynice has worked with over 1,000 organizations and communities to deliver work that has reached over 500,000,000 people, including the American Heart Association, Apple, the City of Los Angeles, Google, and the United Nations.

For over 15 years, verynice has been driven by a mission to alleviate expenses for nonprofit organizations while increasing access to design for all. To-date, our unique blend of impact models have offset $60,000,000 USD in professional services fees. verynice and our global community of artists, designers, strategists, technologists, and writers, have facilitated over 100,000 hours of pro-bono service for more than 1,800 organizations. verynice also curates an extensive collection of design strategy toolkits, offering free-to-use methods that have reached over 200,000 people from 175 countries, while offsetting an additional 200,000 hours of professional service.

Matthew is the Director of Challenge-Based Learning and Associate Professor of Design Strategy at the USC Iovine and Young Academy, a school that brings together design, business, and technology in order to empower the next generation of entrepreneurs and innovators. As Director, Matthew leads a robust portfolio of industry-facing initiatives that challenge students to develop projects in response to complex problems faced by individuals, communities, organizations, and society at-large. Partners have included Adidas, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, Dell, EY, Fisher-Price, Los Angeles World Airports (LAX), Mattel, XQ Super Schools, and ZipRecruiter. At USC, Matthew has also served as a Founding Curriculum Designer for the Iovine and Young Center. Part of the Los Angeles Unified School District, the Iovine and Young Center is a public high school that integrates design, technology, and entrepreneurship.

Matthew has delivered lectures, facilitated workshops, or exhibited work at 200+ events in 20 countries, including two TEDx talks. Select collaborators and hosts also include the AIGA, Apple Education, Code for America, Core77, the Embassy of the United States of America in Moscow, HOW Design Live, the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, the National Endowment for the Arts, Singularity University, and SXSW EDU. He has served as a guest lecturer at 40+ business accelerator programs, colleges, high schools, and universities around the world. With Apple Education, he has created content and training on strategic foresight and creativity for 690 K-12 schools spanning 36 countries.

Matthew’s work has been featured in numerous print, online, and broadcast venues including ABC, Business Insider, CBS, Entrepreneur, Fast Company, Forbes, FOX, GD USA, GOOD, The Guardian, HOW, HuffPo, Inc, Maxim, MTV, NBC, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Success Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired. His articles and creative writing have been published in numerous blogs, books, magazines, and academic journals across the globe. He is also the author of two books: How to Give Half of Your Work Away for Free and Toward a Preemptive Social Enterprise. Matthew is also the author or editor of over 30 design strategy toolkits used in conference rooms, classrooms, and community centers across the globe.

Prior to his current appointment with USC, Matthew held various adjunct teaching positions at the ArtCenter College of Design, CCA's Design MBA Program, the Strelka Institute in Moscow, and UCLA Design Media Arts. Passionate about curriculum design, Matthew has contributed to the design and development of 60+ high school, undergraduate, and graduate-level classes across numerous fields and disciplines. At UCLA, he launched the first course on entrepreneurship in the School of Arts and Architecture's history; at ArtCenter, CCA, and Strelka, he launched courses on social entrepreneurship. 

Matthew is the Founder of the Nine Panel Project, where he enjoys the roles of editor and cartoonist. The Nine Panel Project’s purpose is to bring together a diverse array of storytellers and artists to craft short-form comics about an experience relevant to the social determinants of health: economic stability, safety in community, trauma and family history, and access to quality education, healthcare, and shelter. So far, Nine Panel Project has published 4 volumes of “graphic listening” anthologies, in partnership with the American Heart Association.

Through the COVID-19 pandemic, Matthew served as the inaugural Chair of Mayor Garcetti's Creative Advisory Board. The board advises the Mayor on the ways the creative community can impact economic recovery for small businesses in Los Angeles. In conjunction with this appointment, Matthew was part of the founding team that launched LA Optimized, a $5.5MM pandemic response program designed to connect creatives with local small businesses in need of services to expand their online presence and e-commerce capabilities. Matthew continues to advice the City on creative and strategic challenges. He also currently serves as a design and innovation advisor for the International Rescue Committee, and an advisory board member for Pando Populus. 

Matthew holds an MFA in Media Design from ArtCenter College of Design, and a BA in Design Media Arts from UCLA. When he isn’t working with clients or students, he can be found reading and collecting comics, playing with his twin toddlers, skateboarding, and smoking meat.