Davar Ardalan

It includes historical documents, handwritten letters, archival photos, and over 30 media files including music, videos and several audio recordings from 1912, 1915, and 1924 used with permission from Sony Music.

Iran Davar Ardalan (born April 1, 1964) is a tech entrepreneur, journalist, and author based in Washington, D.C. Known as Davar Ardalan, she is the founder of TulipAI, former Executive Producer of Audio at National Geographic, and has served as co-chair of the Cultural Heritage and AI track at ITU's AI for Good.

Prior to this, she was deputy director of the White House Presidential Innovation Fellowship Program in Washington, D.C. She was also a long-time journalist at NPR News, where she helped shape the news shows Weekend Edition and Morning Edition, and was responsible for decisions that required elaborate coordination such as live broadcasts from Baghdad, Kabul, and New Orleans.

Ardalan is an advocate for cross-platform storytelling.

At NPR, her real-time storytelling campaigns cultivated thought leaders across platforms and reached millions on Twitter and Facebook.

At TulipAI, Ardalan has presented a variety of AI-powered initiatives that encompass cultural, ethical, and technological dimensions.

One such initiative is the AI Assistant for podcasts, an example of which is CK, an AI digital assistant that co-hosts the "Long Sought" podcast.

This assistant enables listeners to delve into historical data and stories, integrating past narratives with contemporary AI features.

As of October 2023, CK supports multilingual interactions, though it restricts user messages to ten per session due to ecological and computational considerations.

Another TulipAI project, "Soundscapes," focuses on producing audio content that is both ethically sourced and culturally diverse, and uses a profit-sharing model to encourage sustainability and ethical practices in audio production.

"Laleh AI" is designed to preserve the teachings and insights of the late Dr. Laleh Bakhtiar through an interactive AI experience that aims to blend respect for past wisdom with the technological advancements of the future.

Outside of TulipAI, Ardalan supports the “Zabanzad" project, overseen by Dr. Vahid Behzadan at the University of New Haven's SAIL Lab. This venture integrates technological advancements with Persian linguistic and cultural elements, aiming to develop an AI model tailored for the Iranian diaspora.

Ardalan's career in American media began in 1991 at KOAT-TV in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

A year later, she made the switch to radio as a reporter at KUNM-FM in Albuquerque.

She produced award-winning cultural and news stories on health and environmental concerns in Los Alamos for which she won first place in documentaries from the Associated Press in New Mexico.

Ardalan joined NPR in 1993.

She began as a temporary production assistant in July 1993 and moved to a full-time production assistant position at Weekend Edition Sunday a year later.

She held many titles at NPR News, including Senior Producer of NPR's Identify and Culture Unit, Senior Supervising Producer of Weekend Edition, Senior Supervising Producer of Morning Edition.

Throughout her career, she has produced a wide array of radio stories, especially those pertaining to the culture, art, history, women's rights, and politics in Iran, as well as issues surrounding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The book also contains links to certain NPR stories from between 1995 and 2012 with permission from NPR.

In 2004, Ardalan's full name, Iran Davar Ardalan, inspired the three-part NPR/American Radioworks series, My Name is Iran, which traced her Iranian heritage, as well as her own experiences after the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Ardalan left NPR in 2010, but subsequently came back to the organization.

In May 2014, she was the recipient of an Ellis Island Medal of Honor, for individual achievement and for promoting cultural unity.

She is the author of two books, My Name is Iran and The Persian Square.

Ardalan was the senior producer of NPR's Tell Me More and in 2015, her last position at NPR was Senior Producer of the Identity and Culture Unit.

Ardalan is the author of The Persian Square, an intimate but historically grounded telling of how American and Iranian traditions have embraced one another.

This digital book, available on iTunes and Kindle, offers a vivid portrait of Iranian Americans — exploring the early intersections between the two countries' citizens and the unexpected places where American and Iranian tradition have embraced one another.

In 2017, Ardalan designed an immersive storytelling project around healthy eating in the South Pacific funded by the innovationXchange of the Australian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

From 2018 to 2022, Ardalan was the founder and chief storytelling officer at IVOW (Intelligent Voices of Wisdom), which champions culturally conscious data strategies across multiple industries, from academia to development and enterprise.

In April 2021, Project Voice awarded IVOW the Google Developer of the Year and a medal for Diversity and Inclusion.

Ardalan has also served as Managing Editor at Hanson Robotics, and is a member of the AI for Good Brain Trust, composed of an international panel of innovators and thinkers from industry, United Nations (UN) agencies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), civil society, the UN's member states, academia, start-ups, media and the arts who assist in identifying initiatives aimed at using AI to advance the UN SDGs.

Davar Ardalan has been recognized with a NASA Team Leadership award for Space Apps, two NABJ Awards, a Gracie Award from the American Women in Radio and Television and a shout-out in the comic strip Zippy.

Davar Ardalan joined the White House Presidential Innovation Fellows program (PIF) as deputy director and Director of Storytelling in October 2018, working with Executive Director Joshua DiFrances.

The fellowship pairs entrepreneurs, designers and innovators from the private sector to team up with forward-thinking agency partners to modernize critical government services, including transportation, healthcare, veterans affairs, and American technology, as well as hosting engagement workshops on data and digital storytelling.

As Director of Storytelling, Ardalan led campaigns for clients such as NASA, USAID, the Australian Aid program, and the World Bank.

These campaigns centered around big data, sustainability, ocean health, food and nutrition, and materials innovation.

The pilots launched in the South Pacific in 2018 and were geared towards tackling malnutrition and bringing back pride to traditional diets via VR and gamification.

Ardalan joined National Geographic in August 2020.

As National Geographic's executive producer of audio, she oversees the award-winning podcast series Overheard, as well as the limited series Into the Depths, which followed a group of Black divers dedicated to finding and documenting some of the thousand slave ships that wrecked in the Atlantic Ocean during the transatlantic slave trade.

Together with National Geographic Society, Ardalan's audio team has also piloted Soundbank, a database featuring crowdsourced sounds of nature from explorers and photographers around the world.