Tea Uglow is co-founder of Dark Swan Institute: a creative & strategic consultancy focused on future trends and exploring cultural-digital interfaces with corporations, consultants, creative agencies, individual creators and producers at the boundaries of traditional cultural practice – across theatre, literature, history, cinema, music, science and the circus.
Tea founded Creative Labs for Google in London (2007) and Sydney (2012) where she worked with cultural organisations on digital experiments. A Universe Explodes, a proto-NFT blockchain artefact won a 2018 Peabody award for digital storytelling and was included in a British Library exhibition in 2023.
Tea is well known for her many online talks. Her 2015 TEDx talk isn’t quite at 2 million views but let’s say it is. In 2023 she was President of the Cannes Glass Jury, President of Spikes’ Influencer jury, D&AD’s Digital Jury in 2018. As a queer activist she co-authored the trans pride flag emoji proposal, and has written several books including an anthology of LGBTQ speeches called Loud and Proud.