NEW YORK (TIP): The fourth Women Entrepreneurs Festival (WE4), a conference developed and produced by NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) will take place on Tuesday, January 14 and Wednesday, January 15 at NYU. The festival’s mission is to celebrate and encourage women entrepreneurs to create a strong network of like-minded women for support, skills, connections and advice. The program will kick off with a keynote address on January 14 at 6 p.m. by Dr. Anne Marie Slaughter, President and CEO of the New America Foundation.

Dr. Slaughter is a public policy expert and Professor of Political Science at Princeton University, who started a national conversation with her article in The Atlantic, “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All.” The following day consists of panels and break-out sessions designed to illuminate and demystify the process of starting a business for women at various stages in their careers, and to give attendees the opportunity meet and share ideas and experiences. ITP, run for decades by the late legendary IT pioneer and educator Red Burns, has garnered a global reputation for leverating technology to foster novel, counterintuitive and artistic cross-disciplinary creation, counting Dennis Crowley (Foursquare), Leo Villareal (LED Artist) and Tom Igoe (Arduino) as alumni. Unlike most prestigious technology-focused graduate programs, ITP regularly achieves a 50/50 gender balance among students in the 2- year graduate program. The goal of ITP, housed in NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, is to explore the imaginative use of communications technologies – how they might augment, improve and bring delight and art into people’s lives.

“It takes courage to start a business. You’ve got to be brave to raise money, to hire and fire people, to know when to let go, to know when to rev up,” said Nancy Hechinger, ITP faculty and co-founder of the Women Entrepreneurs Festival. “Women have always been brave within the societal roles set up for them; some women were bold enough to escape those boundaries. Today, we have more choices than any other time in history. And so, it takes even more courage to make the choices that are right for you.” Festival sessions will focus around such topics as raising capital, scaling a business, and effective networking techniques. Panelists include Kara Goldin (Hint, Inc.), and Kellee James (Mercaris), Crystal Hutter (Edomodo), and Tanyan Menendez (Maker’s Row). Geraldine Laybourne, President of Alloy Media and Kandu and founder of Oxygen Media, will give closing remarks.

A full schedule of the day’s events can be found at itp.nyu.edu/we/2014. The Women Entrepreneurs Festival will be streamed Livestream. The Women Entrepreneurs Festival was cofounded by Joanne Wilson and produced by Midori Yasuda, and is made possible by the generous support of Silicon Valley Bank, L’Oreal Women in Digital, Cooley LLP, Union Square Ventures, Fast Company, Lifeworx, and Starvest Partners. The keynote address will be held on January 14-15 at the Paulson Auditorium at the NYU Stern School of Business, located at 40 West 4th St, New York, NY. Doors open at 5:30 p.m. Conference programming on January 15 will take place at the 10th Floor Rosenthal Pavilion at the NYU Kimmel Center for University Life, located at 60 Washington Square South, New York, NY. To receive a press pass, please contact Shonna Keogan at 212-998-6796 or email shonna.keogan@nyu.edu.