Media Impact Workshops

Our media impact workshops are designed to build collaboration, spur important conversations, and offer tangible ways for your organization to create content through an authentic and inclusive lens that is good for business and positively impacts audiences and society. We develop workshops for all roles in media creation, from writers, showrunners, animators, designers, to gaming developers, executive leadership and more. Our workshops are designed to support your company’s DEIA values and goals at any stage of the creative process - including development, casting, marketing, and beyond.

CSS Media Impact DEIA Work

CSS has focused on the importance of authentic and inclusive content since its inception in 2019 and quickly became a leader in the DEIA field. CSS supports creators in media and entertainment, tech, gaming, education, and consumer products around key issues such as diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, mental health, kids and tech, and inequality. CSS has developed workshops, tools and research reports that apply DEIA concepts to clients’ creative work and internal development processes. Our original research and custom research conducted in collaboration with YouTube, CAA (and others) has been featured in outlets such as the NYT, Deadline, NY Post, AP, and NPR. Our workshops are created for executive, development, creative teams, sales and marketing departments, content acquisition teams, large and small scale creators and more. We’ve developed DEIA projects (research, workshops and curriculums) with Disney, Warner Bros Discovery, Lionsgate, STARZ, Mattel, Lego, Twitch, YouTube, and Activision.

Clients

How We Work

We weave together our unique expertise in academia and the media industry to craft novel workshops tailored to creatives. As the only organization approaching inclusive content through a dual-lens approach, our workshops offer a distinct advantage—we not only explore DEIA topics but also master the art of embedding these principles into the heart of your storytelling.

Each workshop is grounded in innovative research that proves how authentic and inclusive storytelling isn't just better for the world, it’s also better for the bottom line. With our workshops, we want to help you harness the power of storytelling to level up your impact while also helping you make the case that inclusion is good for business. 

We partner with more than 100 subject-matter experts from around the world to deliver insights in digestible nuggets. Participants leave the workshops with a better understanding of the current DEIA research, which we bring to life in an interactive format that inspires teams to apply the learnings to their creative process. 


Our standard workshop offering is outlined below. Customized options are available.

  • Interactive format 

  • Designed with your goals in mind

  • 25 to 250 attendees

  • 1.5 — 2 hours in length 

  • Virtual or in-person options

Testimonials

  • "We definitely were inspired by the workshop. When we looked at the broad spectrum of diversity of the season 2 ensemble, we asked, how can we make sure that characters who are historically seen as sidekicks, friends, etc have more robust family lives and backgrounds? So I felt for me it was more retrospective and the workshop really inspired that for me in our show."

    Tim Federle

    Showrunner and Executive Producer of High School Musical: The Musical Series created for Disney+

  • “These workshops are so important to the work we do...but I also can't tell you how much I appreciate them as a parent. THANK YOU.”

    - YouTube Kids workshop attendee. Mental Health & Kids’ Media, 2023.

  • “I have loved these two workshops. Each time I have come away incredibly inspired and wanting to email you all to see how one can get involved with your work. Unlike any other presentations or workshops I've seen on gender representation in video games, yours make me feel like you will actually enact change.”

    - Activision workshop attendee. Gender Roles & Stereotypes, 2023.

  • "Super engaging. Loved that the presenters all had backgrounds in media so that the presentation stayed focused on kids entertainment."

    Anonymous Reviewer

    LEGO

  • "These workshops resulted in our leaders, our teams, and our talent having a deeper understanding of the opportunities and the challenges across diversity, equity and inclusion that specifically and most importantly influence Disney Channel storytelling and how we hope to engage the kids in our audience. These deep dive discussions provided a lens that was very much welcomed and needed in our pursuit to tell stories that resonate deeply, specifically and authentically with our diverse audience."

    Vicki Ariyasu

    Senior Vice President at Disney Channels Worldwide, Diversity & Inclusion and Disney Junior, Educational Resource Group

  • “Everyone was extremely kind, encouraging, and made it feel like a discussion. I really appreciate that.”

    - YouTube Kids workshop attendee. Mental Health & Kids’ Media, 2023.

  • "The CSS workshop was particularly impactful to our creative partners. One team of producers shared that it made them think about how they construct story structure as it relates to building a character’s narrative… That made them realize that when we tell stories in our upcoming show (and others to come), it’s really important to think about perception and how we piece together the various types of stories because we have a responsibility to think about the audience takeaway being about more than meets the eye."

    Nicole Silveira

    Head of Unscripted Formats, Disney+

  • “This was an AMAZING presentation. The speakers were very knowledgeable and I'm really happy the company is prioritizing this.”

    - Activision Blizzard workshop attendee. Gender Stereotypes, Identity, & Expression, 2023.

Current Topics

Subject Dives:

  • Gender Stereotypes, Identity & Expression

  • LGBTQ+ Identities 

  • Colorism 

  • Socio-Economic Inequality 

  • Character Creation & Body Diversity 

  • Authentic Disability Storytelling

  • Adolescent Mental Health

  • Latinx & Hispanic Representation

  • Cultural Appropriation

  • (Custom topic) 

DEIA overview workshops:

  • Intersectionality & Combating Implicit Bias 

  • Race in Kids’ Media 

  • Importance of Allyship 

* All workshops can be tailored for teams creating content for kids, general audiences, and gamers.

Custom Workshops

We also collaborate with clients to create unique custom workshops tailored to their goals and interests.

Our Team

Dr. Yalda T. Uhls - Founder and Executive Director

Dr. Yalda T. Uhls is the founder and executive director of the CSS at UCLA, which is the only youth-centered organization that brings together the academic and creative communities to unlock the power of storytelling and help the next generation thrive and grow. She is an internationally recognized research scientist, educator, author, and expert on the science of media and adolescent development, the importance of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and the evolving nature of parenting. Dr. Uhls’ career bridges the worlds of entertainment and psychological research. She was a movie executive at MGM and Sony who earned an MBA and Ph.D. from UCLA. She now serves as an assistant adjunct professor at UCLA.

Sheena Brevig - Media Impact Workshop Director

Sheena is the CSS Media Impact Workshop Director. She earned her B.S. in neuroscience with an emphasis on community health and then became a filmmaker to leverage the power of authentic storytelling to positively impact society. At CSS she merges her backgrounds in neuroscience/psychology and storytelling to lead the workshops team to craft and curate unique Media Impact Workshops. She is passionate about increasing accurate and inclusive representation across all media, in particular for her LGBTQ+, Asian/Mixed Asian, and disability communities. Through this work she’s supported thousands of content creators in understanding how to create more authentic and inclusive content.

Nina Linhales Barker, M.A - Workshops Project Manager

Nina is a CSS Fellow and Workshops Project Manager. She earned her BA in media studies and Latin American studies from Hampshire College. She graduated with an MA in media studies from the University of Texas at Austin’s Radio-Television-Film Department in May of 2022. Her master’s thesis focused on how ethnicity and nationality impact how Latinx viewers watch Latinx representation in English-language television.