BOARD OF DIRECTORS

YAEL SWERDLOW

Women's Empowerment Foundation

Yael Swerdlow is the CEO and Founder of Maestro Games, SPC as well as co-founder of the Women's Empowerment Foundation.  Yael is an Independent Visiting Scholar in the Gender Studies Department of the University of Southern California and consultant for USC’s groundbreaking Game Pipe Lab.  She is a board member of Shelters for Israel. She is a graduate of USC's  Master of Public Diplomacy program and is an associate member of the Los Angeles Consular Corps. A native Angeleno, Yael has been a freelance photojournalist based in Los Angeles for over twenty years, shooting for United Press International, the Associated Press, and the Los Angeles Times, where she was a part of the Pulitzer Prize winning teams for the Los Angeles Riots in 1992 and the Northridge Earthquake of 1994.  In summer of 1994, Yael went to Somalia, Southern Sudan, and Rwanda for International Medical Corps, to document the reestablishing of the medical infrastructure in those war-torn countries.  Yael also writes fiction, including the cinematic script for Activision’s best-selling video game, “True Crime:  Streets of LA”.