Yael Swerdlow is the CEO and Founder of Maestro Games, SPC. Yael is co-founder of the Women's Empowerment Foundation, a board member of the International Citizen Diplomacy Council of Los Angeles and a board member of the humanitarian organization, Shelters for Israel. Yael also serves on the Advisory Boards of MILO Cognitive, First Amendment Voice, Solution Point+, and is a consultant at USC's award winning Game Pipe Labs. Formerly, she was co-chair of the national leadership council of Games for Change, and a board member of the Hadassah Brandeis Gender Research Institute. Formerly, Yael held the position of Independent Visiting Scholar in the Gender Studies Department of the University of Southern California where she created and taught Spy Novel Diplomacy - a groundbreaking class that examines the role of gender in espionage, intelligence gathering and propaganda.

A native Angeleno, Yael was a freelance photojournalist based in Los Angeles for over twenty years, shooting for United Press International, the Associated Press, and the Los Angeles Times, where she was a part of the Pulitzer Prize winning teams for the Los Angeles Riots in 1992 and the Northridge Earthquake of 1994. In summer of 1994, Yael went to Somalia, Southern Sudan, and Rwanda for International Medical Corps, to document the reestablishing of the medical infrastructure in those war-torn countries. Yael also writes fiction, including the cinematic script for Activision’s best selling video game, “True Crime: Streets of LA”.