People

Dawn Nakagawa

Dawn Nakagawa

Executive Vice President

Biography

Dawn Nakagawa is the Executive Vice President of the Berggruen Institute, which was launched in 2010 with Dawn as its first employee. In this position, she develops strategy, develops and launches projects, oversees management of finances and operations and builds the team. The mission of the organization is to deepen our understanding of the great transformations of our time and develop social and political institutions adapted to them. The key projects of the institute include the Future of Democracy, Transformations of the Human, Globalization and the New Multilateralism, and Economic Transformations. Special initiatives include the Berggruen Prize and Noema Magazine.

Dawn is co-director of the Future of Democracy program area and oversees special projects such as the Renovating Democracy for the Digital Society project, which she launched in 2016 with Matt Browne, the founder of Global Progress. The project works with policy makers and academics to understand the impact of changes in communications technology on democratic institutions and how to adapt.

Prior to joining the Berggruen Institute, Dawn was the Executive Vice President of the Pacific Council on International Policy, a global affairs organization based in Los Angeles. In her position, she oversaw all aspects of the organization and drove several special initiatives including the Energy and Security Committee and the Equitable Globalization Committee. She also co-directed the California Adaptation Advisory Council to the State of California under Governor Schwarzenegger.

Prior to joining the Pacific Council, Dawn worked as a consultant for McKinsey & Company, where she developed growth strategy for Fortune 500 companies in a variety of industries, focusing on the high tech and biotech industries. She holds an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and an undergraduate degree in Political Science from McGill University in Canada. Dawn sits on the advisory board of Blueprints and the Values Schools charter organization, Think Long Committee, Inc. Dawn is a founding member of the LA chapter of Awesome Foundation. She lives in Hermosa Beach, California, with her husband Gene and two children, Ty and Jada.

Articles

composed by Arswain
machine learning consultation by Anna Tskhovrebov
commissioned by the Berggruen Institute
premiered at the Bradbury Building
downtown Los Angeles
april 22, 2022

Human perception of what sounds “beautiful” is necessarily biased and exclusive. If we are to truly expand our hearing apparatus, and thus our notion of beauty, we must not only shed preconceived sonic associations but also invite creative participation from beings non-human and non-living. We must also begin to cede creative control away from ourselves and toward such beings by encouraging them to exercise their own standards of beauty and collaborate with each other.

Movement I: Alarm Call
‘Alarm Call’ is a long-form composition and sound collage that juxtaposes, combines, and manipulates alarm calls from various human, non-human, and non-living beings. Evolutionary biologists understand the alarm call to be an altruistic behavior between species, who, by warning others of danger, place themselves by instinct in a broader system of belonging. The piece poses the question: how might we hear better to broaden and enhance our sense of belonging in the universe? Might we behave more altruistically if we better heed the calls of – and call out to – non-human beings?

Using granular synthesis, biofeedback, and algorithmic modulation, I fold the human alarm call – the siren – into non-human alarm calls, generating novel “inter-being” sonic collaborations with increasing sophistication and complexity. 

Movement II: A.I.-Truism
A synthesizer piece co-written with an AI in the style of Vangelis’s Blade Runner score, to pay homage to the space of the Bradbury Building.

Movement III: Alarmism
A machine learning model “learns” A.I.Truism and recreates Alarm Call, generating an original fusion of the two.

Movement IV: A.I. Call
A machine learning model “learns” Alarm Call and recreates A.I.Truism, generating an original fusion of the two.

RAVE (IRCAM 2021) https://github.com/acids-ircam/RAVE