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Laura Donnelly

2018 Speaker

LAURA DONNELLY has been a journalist, a book publicist for Maya Angelou, former President Jimmy Carter and Jurassic Park creator Michael Crichton. She was a documentary filmmaker, and even a production assistant For the Geraldo Rivera show. She majored in English and minored in computer science in 1993 at Fairleigh Dickinson University in NJ. Twenty three years later, she is back in tech education introducing Latina and other girls of color to Javascript, CSS, HTML, robotics and more in addition to the fun of digital media production. While earning her masters at the University of Texas Austin, she co-founded the first magazine made for and by young Latinas, and a non-profit that empowers girls to innovate through media and technology. She has been recognized for her role in empowering young Latinas as a 2010 winner of Austin’s Under 40 awards, the YWCA of Austin Woman of the Year, Leader of Promise, and nationally as Hispanicize’s Positive Impact Award winner in 2015. She was also selected to the Mayor’s special task force to End Systemic and Institutional Racism, a 2013 Leadership Austin Essentials graduate, Austin Innotech’s Woman of the Year, and a finalist for Austin Business Journal’s Profiles in Power award in 2017. @latinitas