Virginia Heffernan is a journalist, critic and author, most recently, of MAGIC AND LOSS: The Internet as Art (Simon & Schuster). From 2008 to 2012, Heffernan wrote "The Medium," a weekly column about Internet culture, for The New York Times Magazine. Before introducing the column, Heffernan spent four years as a television critic at the daily Times, where, in addition to writing reviews and features, she chronicled the convergence of television and the Internet. In 2002, she received a Ph.D. in English and American literature from Harvard.

As a member of PEN America, Heffernan often consults with VCs, startups, public companies and non-profits as an editorial director. She is the author of the 2016 Peabody Awards. Heffernan's essays have been widely anthologized, most recently in, What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence (2015). She has also written for The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, MTV, POLITICO, VICE, WIRED, and many other publications. To discuss digital culture, she has appeared on The Open Mind, 20/20, CNBC, MSNBC, and she appears regularly on NPR. As an academic and a journalist, Heffernan has lectured and keynoted at Google, The Library of Congress, Princeton, Harvard, and The National Gallery of Art, among many other institutions.