About
narrative
technology,
Team
Founder and CEO
Carri Twigg is the Founder and CEO of AMERICAN STORY—a strategic studio for cultural influence and democratic renewal.
A former White House official who served as Special Assistant to President Obama and Director of Public Engagement for Vice President Biden, Carri brings rare fluency in the relationship between media, politics, and culture—and what that relationship means for real people in the real world. Carri is also the co-founder of Culture House Media, co-host of the politics and culture podcast Twigg and Jenkins, and a former member of the President’s Advisory Committee on the Arts, a board of the Kennedy Center.
Her work as a producer and cultural strategist has spanned Netflix, Disney+, MTV, BET, NowThis, and beyond. She has built and consulted on multiple strategic cultural movements, including Schools Not Prisons, Save The Day, and the #BehindTheVote Campaign.
As President of AMERICAN STORY, Carri is bringing everything she has built—the relationships, the craft, the conviction—to the largest stage of her career. Premium entertainment that carries democratic values through story. Content that meets America where it lives, and reminds it of what it is still capable of becoming.
She has spent a career proving that culture change is possible.
AMERICAN STORY proves it at scale.
Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer
Jonathan Olinger is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker and the founder of HUMAN and HUMAN.vote—organizations built at the nexus of culture and political power.
As a producer and creative strategist, his work has reached audiences through CNN, Univision, The New York Times, MS NOW, and beyond. He has supported Democratic presidential campaigns including Harris, Biden, Sanders, and Bloomberg—and has partnered with leading cultural voices to advance narratives that drive human rights and democratic values.
As Chief Creative Strategist of AMERICAN STORY, Jonathan architects the creative vision and strategic infrastructure behind the studio—shaping what gets made, how it moves, and why it matters. From investor strategy to brand identity to content development, he bridges the distance between conviction and execution.
After building at the intersection of story and power, AMERICAN STORY is where that work becomes a studio.
Narrative Intelligence
Jared Starkweather began his career as the founder of an agriculture technology startup built on his patented water-access technology, launched after he won the Donald W. Reynolds Governor’s Cup, a Shark Tank-style pitch competition in the Midwest.
At Stanley Black & Decker, he helped pioneer Industry 4.0 practices, digitizing plant operations through custom applications, analytics and automation. He also created a global leadership development program for high-performing shop-floor technicians, personally greenlit by the CEO.
At Upwork, Jared built the company’s operational data lake and led initiatives that cut incident detection and resolution times by more than 70%, contributing to five-nines availability. In engineering operations, he helped cut feature deployment lead time by more than 50% and delivered more than $1.2 million in cloud savings. He went on to lead Upwork’s Intelligent Infrastructure team, building its first AI-first engineering team and its first production platform for deploying and managing AI agents.
At AMERICAN STORY, Jared is integrating agentic AI into the studio’s core infrastructure and operations, redesigning how work gets done when people and autonomous agents build together. His leadership is grounded in empathy, service and the belief that lasting transformation comes from serving the people who make it happen.
