Yael Swerdlow CEO and Founder
Maestro Games

Yael Swerdlow is the CEO and Founder of Maestro Games, SPC as well as co-founder of the Women’s Empowerment Foundation. She is a board member of the International Visitors Council of Los Angeles and Shelters for Israel.  Formerly, she was co-chair of the national leadership council of Games for Change, and a board member of the Hadassah Brandeis Gender Research Institute.  She is a graduate of USC’s groundbreaking Master of Public Diplomacy program and is an associate member of the Los Angeles Consular Corps. Previously Yael was the Director of Media Relations for the Consulate General of the State of Israel for the Southwestern United States.

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”.