to Indonesia , India , Morocco , Israel , Germany , Poland , Hungary , Slovakia , Japan and Korea . Matt is a past board chair of the Photographic Center Northwest , a nonprofit in Seattle . He is the founding member of Sunbreak Advisors and actively offers consulting services for software product management and cloud economics for technology companies . Prior to that , Matt was at Amazon Web Services for 6 years and at Microsoft Corporation for 25 years , where he held leadership roles in product , marketing and sales organizations . Matt earned degrees in Electrical Engineering from Yale University , an MBA from the University of Chicago , and , most recently , a degree in fine art photography in 2022 from Photographic Center Northwest .
KEYNOTE SPEAKER MATTI FRIEDMAN
Matti Friedman is a journalist and the award-winning author of four works of non-fiction . Matti ’ s most recent book Who by Fire : Leonard Cohen in the Sinai is an account of Leonard Cohen ’ s concert tour to the front lines of the Yom Kippur War . The book has been listed by both Vanity Fair and Mosaic Magazine as among their top books of 2022 and is being made into a limited TV dramatic series by Keshet International .
Matti ’ s 2019 book , Spies of No Country : Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel , won the 2019 Natan Prize and the Canadian Jewish Book Award , among other prizes . His 2016 book , Pumpkinflowers : A Soldier ’ s Story of a Forgotten War was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book and won the 2017 Vine Award for Canadian Jewish literature , among other honors . Matti ’ s first book , The Aleppo Codex , was awarded the 2014 Sami Rohr Prize and the American Library Association ’ s Sophie Brody Medal .
A former Associated Press correspondent , Matti ’ s work as a reporter has taken him from Israel to Lebanon , Morocco , Moscow , the Caucasus , and Washington , DC . Two critical essays he wrote about media coverage of Israel after the 2014 Gaza war , for Tablet and The Atlantic , triggered intense discussion and have been shared on Facebook more than 130,000 times . His writing has appeared in The New York Times , The Atlantic , Tablet , Smithsonian , and elsewhere .