Emily Knapp is Chief of Staff at the Berggruen Institute, where she helps translate ambitious ideas into concrete initiatives that shape public thought and institutional innovation. With two decades of experience spanning global advertising, social impact consulting, academia, and creative leadership, she specializes in connecting vision to execution through storytelling, systems thinking, and design.

Before joining the Berggruen Institute, Emily worked with leading creative firms and global brands including Procter & Gamble, Heineken, and the Getty Foundation, and co-founded SwellShark, an early digital content agency exploring new media storytelling. She later brought this experience to the social impact sector and then to an interdisciplinary design lab at UC San Diego, where she guided collaborations between researchers, artists, and urban planners.

At the Berggruen Institute, Emily helped establish the Antikythera program, an R&D institute for Planetary Computation, and played a key role in producing the Planetary Summit, a landmark convening on addressing planetary-scale challenges. Her work bridges creativity and structure, fostering the conditions for transformative ideas to emerge and take shape.