Lisa Russell: The Emmy‑Winning Filmmaker Turning AI Art into a Force for Good

• Lisa Russell is an Emmy-winning filmmaker and former humanitarian aid worker who has spent two decades using ethical, empowering storytelling to bridge art, policy and global social impact.
• Shaped by witnessing harmful media portrayals in refugee camps, she has built a career amplifying dignified, solution-focused narratives through films, books and UN-backed cultural initiatives.
• Now a leader in AI for Good, Russell is using AI filmmaking and platforms like ArtsEnvoy to democratise storytelling, elevate Global South voices, and drive cultural and climate action at scale.

 

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By Daniel Simons

 

Lisa Russell has been a hip‑hop backup dancer for Busta Rhymes and Usher, a humanitarian aid worker, and a keynote speaker for the United Nations.

Now, the Emmy‑winning filmmaker is sharpening her focus on a new audacious goal: harnessing the power of AI art and filmmaking to drive social and cultural transformation.

When Russell was young her dream was to become a dancer, but her mother insisted that she ‘get a real job’. After studying a Masters of Public Health in Boston, Russell’s first ‘real job’ was as an aid worker in the Kosovo refugee camps in 1999. It was in those camps she witnessed something that would shape the rest of her life.

She began to notice that the film crews who arrived to document the crisis were letting down the very people she was there to support.

Their storytelling was reductive and disempowering. It focused on trauma, cast people as victims, and erased dignity, complexity and strength.

In one conversation she’s never forgotten, a Kosovar woman recounted how journalists had parachuted into the camp on a two-day story deadline and bluntly asked the women to raise their hands if they had been sexually abused.

In another, a woman spoke of a deeper fear that by the end of the war, they would no longer be remembered as Kosovar women, but only as women who had been abused.

Those encounters hit Russell hard, and she ricocheted into filmmaking with a fierce determination to tell stories differently. Unlike the reductive and often exploitative portrayals she witnessed, her storytelling would be grounded in ethics, respect, responsibility, and empowerment.

For more than 20 years, Russell has worked with UN agencies and NGOs, bridging the worlds of policy and culture through storytelling and art.

She has produced dozens of films and won an Emmy despite never attending film school. Her short film Mother’s Cry has screened three times at the United Nations and at over 35 international festivals.

She is also the bestselling author of You Will Not Erase Me: A Memoir in Poetry, Protest, and Survival, a powerful collection exploring erasure, resistance, and reclaiming space amid systemic injustice.

Russell is also passionate about ensuring artists have a seat at the table. Fluent in both UN-speak and artist-speak, she uses her skills to empower creators to play a meaningful role in shaping global policy and culture.

She curated the WHO’s Health for All COVID-19 Arts Prize, serves as Global Co-Chair of the UN Civil Society Arts & Culture ImPACT Coalition, and in 2015 launched Create2030, a global network of artists dedicated to advancing the Sustainable Development Goals.

In 2024, Russell released her first AI-generated short film, Moving On, produced in collaboration with Nigerian artist AkayCentric.

Premiering at COP29, it was the first AI-generated climate music video to come out of Africa. The experience confirmed her belief in AI’s power as both a creative medium and as a tool to bypass traditional gatekeepers, expand access, and enable BIPOC and Global South artists to shape their own futures on their own terms.

After Moving On, Russell ‘moved up’ to become a driving force in the AI for Good ecosystem. She serves as a judge for the UN’s AI for Good Film Festival, is a Women in AI Ambassador in Kenya, and is developing the AI for the Future Festival, a new platform focused on impact-driven storytelling in the age of artificial intelligence.

Russell’s latest venture, ArtsEnvoy, features over 100 ethical AI apps and serves as both gateway and community for impact creators worldwide.

The Climate Storyteller app transforms climate data into compelling scripts and social content. Artify the Goals enables creators to visualize the 17 SDGs. Ancestral Knowledge draws on African cosmologies and traditions to inspire digital storytelling. There’s even an app that turns UN reports into poetry.

Through ArtsEnvoy, Russell also runs online AI Creator Academies. The first launched in Kenya, with expansion planned across Africa, Bangladesh and beyond.

From the frontlines of humanitarian aid to the frontiers of artificial intelligence, Russell has been a pioneer in bridging art, activism, and sustainable development.

Local Peoples chatted with her to discuss her journey, the ethics of AI and her vision for how technology-enhanced storytelling can help shape the future.

Why is storytelling such a powerful tool for creating change in the world?

I’ve been working as a filmmaker in the social good and global good space, mostly as a contracted UN filmmaker for the last 20 years, and I have found that storytelling is an incredible way to engage with people about serious things going on in our world, whether it’s war and conflict, peace and security, health, education, or climate change.

I believe we are not even fully aware of just how powerful storytelling is for humanity. I often like to reference the amazing study by a professor from Princeton, who analyzed brain waves in an fRMI machine and found that our brains all synchronise when we hear the same stories.

So for me, that means that whether you’re a musician, a really good speaker, a poet, or anybody who commands attention, you literally, without any physical touch, are able to get everybody on the same wavelength. And that is incredible to me.

What I have found, specifically working in the UN space, is that storytelling is an incredibly powerful tool to help translate and then amplify the important work being done.

The UN does great with writing 500-page reports. They do great with policymaking. They’re not great with communicating the kind of work that they’re doing in a way that reaches and mobilises a wider audience.

So storytelling, whether it’s film or poetry or music or photography, I think, is an untapped tool in global diplomacy spaces, and I have spent my whole career trying to change that.

 

You have said that when it comes to global challenges, “we have all the solutions, but do we have the right stories?” What are the right stories?

I think the right stories are grounded in emotion, not information. I think the right stories are figuring out how to make stories out of data. It’s a lot easier to tell stories about people. But the planet is a little bit different.

I feel that climate storytelling right now is either really data-driven, really science policy-driven, or is focused on stories about influencers doing work around climate. I don’t think those are the solutions. I think it’s somewhere in the middle.

I also think that good storytelling requires us to personify the planet, and that we should focus more on solutions stories and not perpetuate the doom and gloom narratives.

After 20 years in filmmaking you decided to embrace Artificial Intelligence. Why did you choose to become an AI filmmaker? 

I came into AI filmmaking on a whim. There was an International Women’s Day in 2023, and UN Women had put out a press release that was talking about gender bias in technology and in AI. I was like, “Oh, I want to make a film about this.”

So literally one day I  found the tools and I put together a short fictional film about women in AI descending upon the United Nations to rewrite the charter because they wanted representation.

After that, I realised that I’m able to make a film without any funding, with no producer. I don’t need Hollywood. I literally just need my imagination and my fingertips on my keyboard.

I can create a film about anything. I can make it in the future by 5000 years. I can make it in outer space. I can make it underwater. I can make talking animals. Whatever you can imagine, you can make a film about it.

I also thought, if I can do it, anyone around the world can. It can have a real democratising power, especially in the Global South or where filmmaking equipment and production costs might have prevented great artists from sharing their stories, and as a tool, it can also elevate the number and quality of stories in the UN space.

 

As a filmmaker, you’ve had a long history of wrestling with the ethical challenges of filmmaking and storytelling. You’re  passionate about narrative justice and ensuring that artists and minorities are ‘not erased’. You’re also a champion of artist empowerment and a warrior against artist exploitation. How did you tackle the ethical challenges associated with AI technology? 

Obviously, there are a lot of ethical considerations with AI and AI filmmaking, especially around climate change and the environmental impacts.

I chose not to jump into the NFT craze when it was exploding, because I was concerned about the impact the technology was having on the planet.

What I realize is that a lot of conscious people don’t jump into new technology because we want to do it right. But what ends up happening is that the movement is then dictated by people who don’t care, or by non-diverse voices.

So this time around, I wanted to be at the forefront of it, and I’m going to work as hard as I can to elevate the voices we need to hear from.

I also feel like the market is going to fix the environmental problems before we fix the other problems like racial or gender inequality.

As a UN filmmaker, I already had a really large footprint with flights and SUV’s and e-waste, so now as I make more AI films, I also try to minimise my personal carbon footprint as much as I can.

Beyond filmmaking, I’ve also built a lot of apps and run the Arts Envoy platform and there are a lot of ethical considerations around that side of things as well. Who owns the data that will be collected when I bring people from different countries onto my platform? Where does that data go? How is it being used? How can I choose ethical apps? How can I create a platform that empowers artists and puts an end to that ‘starving artist’ stereotype?

I’m also working with the special advisor on technology to the president of Kenya, and he talks a lot about the language models themselves. He thinks we need much more hyper-locallised options.

So, for example, maybe East Africa will have its own small language model and it will be fed data related to Swahili or to local culture and languages. That’s going to make their model much more representative and accurate than trying to use a large language model which has been scraping stuff from the Internet, which we all know isn’t really representative of African history or culture because of colonization.

I know that when I tried to build my AI apps around African textiles with my African partners they were not accurate because Africans have not been feeding the AI their representations, their images, their stories, their cultures.

It really is incredibly important to have localised creative education on AI literacy and AI art and have language models that accurately reflect local languages, art and culture.

If we hyper-localize content, we might be able to preserve not only languages that have the threat of being erased but also cultural nuances that only people from that culture will be able to train AI in.

You like to say that after 20 years as an artist working in the UN space you’ve become fluent in both ‘UN speak’ and ‘Artists Speak’, you’re also passionate about the bigger role artists could play at the UN. Could you tell us a bit more about that? 

Artists and people at the UN speak different languages, but we’re having parallel conversations because both worlds want to improve communities, save lives, and tackle our big challenges, but we use different tools and we do it differently.

I think there is a huge power dynamic between policy makers and artists that needs to change.

Policy makers could work with artists to learn what people are saying at the community level, because a lot of artists are deeply rooted and have a lot of power at the community level and likewise artists can learn about policy and then use those insights to help better mobilise or empower their communities.

The UN could also do a much better job at giving artists a voice and giving us a seat at the table.

We know that artists and creatives are creative thinkers and problem solvers. So why would you not want us at the table coming up with solutions? And this is one of the things I keep fighting for. Whether it’s AI policy, climate change or other important issues, artists should be given a real voice.

We have representation for youth, indigenous, and women’s movements. Why not for the creative economy or artists?

 

What is your general advice for people who feel called to make a positive change in the world?

There’s a great saying that if you want to find your purpose in life, find your wound, because you’re perpetually trying to heal that wound through your work, so it will drive you to keep going.

Another thing I would say is that if you’re from the Global North and you want to focus your work around the Global South, I would encourage you to really attack the systems of the Global North that make the Global South suffer.

If you want to focus your attention on Africa, for example, you don’t need to be the voice of the Africans. You could be the voice from the Global North that criticises the systems that make poverty a reality in Africa.

Also, getting your art seen in policymaking spaces, in places where changes are being discussed and made whether it’s policy, boardrooms, or educational institutions is really powerful.