Mauricio Mota

Recently awarded with an Innovation and Inclusion Award by the Digital Diversity Network, Mota is the Founder and Co-President of Wise Entertainment, an Independent Studio focused on content that lives at the intersection of Storytelling, Social Impact, and Civic Imagination. With his wife Katie, he served as executive producer of East Los High, an award-winning drama series that earned six Emmy nominations during its run on Hulu for its realistic portrayal of Latino high school students. Now complete, the show is the streaming platform’s longest-running original.

Mota began his career as an entrepreneur at the age of 15 when he developed a storytelling board game with writer Sonia Rodrigues, which he sold door-to-door all over Brazil. It is now present in over 5,000 schools and later became a YA book collection and has been used by many Forbes 500 companies and the United Nations to foster creativity and innovation among their teams. The patent for the game was used as the foundation for a literacy social network employed by 700,000 kids in public schools in Rio. Later, Mota became a serial entrepreneur, pioneering multi-platform content by designing and creating products and IPs for TV channels, movie studios, and advertisers globally.

Mota was the first Latin American to speak at the Futures of Entertainment conference at MIT. He has been a judge on many international juries, such as Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, Festival of Media, the Emmys, and the One Show.

Mota represents the 4th generation of one of the most important Latin American storytelling legacies and has helped his mother re-shape the estate created by his grandfather, Nelson Rodrigues, who is considered the Brazilian Shakespeare. Most recently, he designed the School of Series, a TV series/IP development lab that is helping shape the next generation of showrunners and content creators in Brazil and trains 800 writers and producers a year.

He sits on the boards of Young Storytellers (a non-profit focused on mentoring low-income students through storytelling), A Call to Men (non-profit that educates men all over the world on healthy, respectful manhood), the Annenberg Innovation Lab, Scriptd (an online marketplace for screenwriters), and the Center for Third Space at the Annenberg School (an institute focused on shaping the next generation of business leaders). Mota also has spoken for national and international audiences, including the White House Fellowship, the State Department, and the World Bank.