Sophie Sutherland
Event Producer, Editor, and Director in Austin, TX
Sophie Sutherland is the founder and director of Magic Seed Media, a content curation and event strategy company. Sophie has worked in the publishing industry, curating and producing events globally for over 15 years.
Founded in 2012, Magic Seed Media works with multi-nationals, start-ups, NGOs, government organizations and others, to create world class events. Magic Seed Media leads the programming for a number of events focused on social progress and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. This includes: The Rockefeller Foundation’s events: The Future of Fragile States, Innovative Frontiers of Development, Solvable and Homecoming, in Bellagio, Italy; and the Social Progress Imperative’s What Works conference, in Reykjavik, Iceland.
In addition to work focused on social progress, Magic Seed Media curates’ conferences across media, marketing and technology. This includes working on the programming for Recode Decode’s Code Conference in May 2018 and curating the content for Vox Media’s SXSW activation 'The Deep End' in 2019.
Sophie worked with the Financial Times to launch and program their successful Future of Marketing Summit which ran from September 2013 until September 2016. She also worked with the Financial Times and the Coalition for Inclusive Capitalism, to launch and program the first Inclusive Capitalism conference in 2014. Sophie served as the program director for the Abu Dhabi Media Summit in 2013 and 2014.
Other Magic Seed Media clients include: Twitter, InterConnect Events, NewsCred, NYC Media Lab, Degreed, and the Greater Washington Board of Trade.
Prior to launching Magic Seed Media, Sophie was the senior event producer at The Economist for almost five years, working across all of The Economist’s conferences in North America. She covered a variety of topics areas, including finance and economics, innovation, big data, media, marketing, human and social capital issues and beyond. Key events include the acclaimed ‘Buttonwood Gathering’, ‘The World in… Festival’ and ‘The Ideas Economy’ series of events.