Soraya Giaccardi

SORAYA GIACCARDI is a researcher, consultant, and speaker working at the intersection of media/entertainment and culture change. She is a Senior Researcher at the Media Impact Project (MIP), the research and evaluation arm of The Norman Lear Center at USC. MIP is a hub for collecting, developing and sharing approaches for measuring the impact of media in order to better understand the role that media plays in changing knowledge, attitudes and behavior among individuals and communities. Previously, Soraya served as Associate Director of Research at the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media.

As a media scholar, her work focuses on the following:
● Measuring, tracking, and improving representation of historically marginalized
communities — including identities like gender, race, sexual orientation, disability, age,
size, and more.
● Measuring the impact of entertainment stories on real-world attitudes, beliefs, intentions,
behaviors, and culture change.

Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals including Psychology of Violence, Media Psychology, Psychology of Men and Masculinity, Sex Roles, Psychology of Women Quarterly, and Emerging Adulthood, and more. Her public scholarship has received coverage in Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, and more.