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Leila Conners Petersen
President and Co-Founder

Leila Conners Petersen founded Tree Media Group in August of 1996. With a background in international politics, Leila set out to build a production company that creates media to support and sustain civil society. Leila and Tree are currently creating an internet television channel, called Tree Channel, that will carry the content that Tree creates, among other media.

Most recently Leila directed, wrote and produced a feature-length documentary, The 11th Hour, with Leonardo DiCaprio and 54 leading thinkers and scientists about the state of the world and the state of the human condition. She has written 2 short films with Leonardo DiCaprio on the environment called Global Warning and Water Planet and a feature film script for Ridley Scotts Scott Free Productions on the state of the oceans. Leila has also been published in newspapers and magazines around the world including the International Herald Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Yomiuri Shimbun and Wired Magazine among others. Projects over the last 10 years with Tree Media Group include work with the Council on Foreign Relations, NASA, JPL, Norman Lear, Green Cross International, Harvard University, and Hollywood studios among others. Her article on Death and American Culture was published in War, Media and Propaganda, published by Rowman and Littlefield. Leila is currently in pre-production on her next feature-length documentary on consciousness and how to heal the environmental crisis.

Prior to Tree Media, Leila was Associate Editor of New Perspectives Quarterly, an international journal of social and political thought, and Associate Editor of Global Viewpoint of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, an internationally distributed op-ed column that reaches 200 papers. At NPQ, she interviewed thinkers and policy makers including: Kofi Annan, Nafis Sadik, Betty Friedan, Hans Bethe, Rigoberta Menchu Tum, Boutros Boutros Ghali among others. She is now Editor-at-Large for NPQ.

In 1991, Leila translated Jacques Attali's book from the French for Random House entitled, Millennium. Leila is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.  She is also a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy and is a member of the Writers Guild of America (WGAW).  Leila serves on the Board of Global Green USA and the Entertainment Board for One Voice, a middle east peace project. Leila is often invited to speak on issues of sustainability and the environment and has served on panels nationally and internationally.  The film, The 11th Hour, to date has won the Diversity Award and the Earthwatch award in the United States and the Clarion Award in the UK.

Leila lives in Santa Monica with her husband Matt and her son Aidan Michael.

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