tl;dr Matthew Manos is a Los Angeles-based educator and strategist passionate about creativity and innovation. 🙋‍♂️

Once called “crazy or genius” by Forbes Magazine, Matthew Manos is a visionary entrepreneur, educator, and strategist specializing in ideation, foresight, and planning. His clients and collaborators have included the American Heart Association, Apple, the City of Los Angeles, Disney Imagineering, Google, Mattel, and UNICEF.

Matthew is an Associate Dean and Associate Professor at the USC Jimmy Iovine and Andre “Dr. Dre” Young Academy, a school that brings together the arts, technology, and business in order to address real-world challenges. There, his teaching focuses on design-driven innovation in both client-facing and entrepreneurial contexts. As the Associate Dean for Academic Strategy, Matthew co-leads curriculum design and delivery across all degree programs, while providing oversight for the school’s signature challenge-based and industry-facing academic and extracurricular experiences. Through prior leadership roles within the school, he helped develop and codify its learning model, and oversaw student affairs, academic advising, and admissions. 

In 2008, Matthew launched verynice, the first social enterprise in the design services industry. Driven by a mission to alleviate expenses for non-profits, verynice’s unique “give-half” pro-bono model was able to successfully offset over $60,000,000 in professional service fees for 1,500+ organizations across the globe.

Matthew also contributed to the launch of the Iovine and Young Center, an interdisciplinary and challenge-based public high school model that has been implemented across the United States. He continues to advise the Iovine and Young Education Group on grade 3-12 curriculum and instructional design as well as teacher training for new schools, course pathways, and after-school programs. With Apple Education, Matthew designed and facilitated teacher training on creativity and futures thinking for 690 K-12 schools spanning 36 countries. 

Matthew has delivered lectures and workshops at more than 350 events across 20 countries, including two TEDx talks, with collaborators and hosts ranging from the AIGA and the National Endowment for the Arts to Singularity University and SXSW EDU. His work and ideas have been featured in outlets including Entrepreneur, Fast Company, Forbes, GOOD, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired. He is also the author of How to Give Half of Your Work Away for Free and Toward a Preemptive Social Enterprise, and has written or edited more than 35 design and strategy toolkits that offer frameworks and methodologies for creative problem-solving that have been used by over 250,000 people from 175+ countries. With the American Heart Association, Matthew was the editor of four issues of Comix From The Heart, a comic book series that shares patient experiences relevant to hypertension, long-COVID, the needs of rural communities, and overall well being.

Through the COVID-19 pandemic, Matthew served as the inaugural Chair of the former Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti's Creative Advisory Board. In conjunction with this appointment, Matthew was part of the founding team that launched LA Optimized, a multi-million dollar pandemic response program designed to connect local creatives with over 1,000 small businesses in need of services to expand their online presence.

Matthew holds an MFA in Media Design Practices from the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, and a BA in Design Media Arts from UCLA. Prior to his current appointment with USC, Matthew held various teaching positions spanning design and entrepreneurship at ArtCenter College of Design, CCA’s Design Strategy MBA, CalArts, the Strelka Institute in Moscow, and UCLA’s Design Media Arts program.