THE
ART
OF
IMPACT
The Art of Impact convenes today's creative changemakers in culture, business, government, and philanthropy to foster dialogue and enable effective partnerships for positive social, economic and environmental impact.
Through intimate interviews, thought-provoking storytelling, and global events, the platform reveals how creative changemakers work at the front lines of transformation — bridging cultures, activating communities, and challenging the assumptions that limit progress.
By centering embodied knowledge, cultural exchange, and long-term value creation, The Art of Impact reframes how impact is understood, measured, sustained and scaled.
Hosted by Christopher Coritsidis, Founder & CEO of Opus 1 Foundation, each episode is an invitation to listen differently — to sit with the practitioners, investors, and visionaries who have staked their work on a conviction the mainstream is only beginning to catch up to: that creativity is not a complement to serious work, but its most powerful expression.
From the creative economies of the Global South to the foundations and family offices rewriting the rules of capital, The Art of Impact maps a world where the most transformative ideas are already in motion.
FOLLOW & STREAM NOW ON
The Podcast
EPISODE 07
Cristina "Mitty" Mittermeier has spent three decades underwater, at the poles, and in the most remote ecosystems on earth. She trained as a marine biologist, but what she discovered was that the science alone wasn't enough. People don't protect what they don't love. And you can't love something you've never been shown.
So she picked up a camera.
A National Geographic photographer and co-founder of SeaLegacy and the International League of Conservation Photographers, Cristina has built a career — and a movement — on the conviction that the most powerful instrument of conservation is a story told with enough beauty to break through.
This is a conversation about what it takes to make the world fall in love with what it's losing — before it's too late.
EPISODE 06
What does an artist do when confronted by decades of violence?
Abed Al Kadiri was born in Beirut. He was on the streets during the 2019 revolution. He was there when the port exploded in 2020. And this spring, he was on his way to run an art workshop with displaced children when the airstrikes started. He kept going.
A painter, curator, and publisher whose work is held in the British Museum, the Institut du Monde Arabe, and the Barjeel Foundation, Abed has spent his career making art that mourns, preserves, and witnesses — from the destruction of the Mosul Museum to the mass drownings of migrants in the Mediterranean to the over 700 displaced children in southern Lebanon whose drawings he is now transforming into books.
This is a conversation about who and what art is actually for when the conditions for ordinary life have broken down — and why the answer turns out to be more practical, and more urgent, than anyone expects.
EPISODE 05
What happens when an engineer, an activist, and an artist are the same person — and the planet is running out of time?
Benjamin Von Wong has spent a decade building installations at the intersection of fantasy and emergency — placing art inside five UN summits, generating 8 billion impressions across 163 countries, and founding Dear Crisis, a New York City community turning climate anxiety into collective action.
This is a conversation about what creativity can do when conventional tools have failed, and why the most powerful response to the end of the world might be a story that makes you fall in love with what's left.
EPISODE 04
The gap between wanting to change the world and actually funding it turns out to be a design problem.
The gap between wanting to change the world and actually funding it turns out to be a design problem. Aunnie Patton Power has been solving it for fifteen years.
In this episode of The Art of Impact, we sat down with Aunnie — Founder of Intelligent Impact, Associate Fellow at Oxford Saïd Business School, and author of Adventure Finance — to dig into why the two dominant models of capital, philanthropy and venture investment, consistently fail the organizations that need them most, and what a smarter alternative actually looks like.
If you've ever wondered why the best work in the world is so hard to fund, this conversation has an answer.
EPISODE 03
Most venture capitalists will tell you they invest in the future. Severin Zugmayer thinks they've been missing it.
The Cultural and Creative Industries represent 5.5% of the EU economy — larger than pharmaceuticals, larger than telecom. And for decades, serious capital has largely looked past them. Severin decided to do something about it.
In this episode of The Art of Impact, Christopher Coritsidis sits down with Severin, Founder and General Partner of New Renaissance Ventures, the first venture fund built exclusively around the thesis that culture is not a soft bet — it's one of the smartest ones available.
From Red Bull to Speedinvest to the founding of NRV, Severin has spent his career asking a question that most investors haven't thought to ask: what if creativity is the asset class we've been overlooking all along?
EPISODE 02
What happens when young people are given the tools to tell their own stories?
That's the question at the heart of Emily Palmer's work — and the driving force behind Next PAGE, a program she founded to put literacy and storytelling in the hands of incarcerated youth in New York City who are too often left out of the narrative.
In this episode of The Art of Impact, Christopher Coritsidis sits down with Emily to explore what it really means to build your voice from the ground up — and why the stories young people tell today are the infrastructure for the world we'll live in tomorrow.
From her career as an investigative journalist to the founding of Next PAGE, Emily brings a reporter's precision and a community builder's heart to one of the most urgent questions in social change: who gets to speak, and who gets to be heard?
A conversation about literacy and the radical act of giving young people a page -- and a pen.
EPISODE 01
