YURI CATALDO

Yuri Cataldo went from the costume shop to the boardroom and never fully left either.

He trained as a designer at Juilliard, Indiana University, and Yale School of Drama, where he earned his MFA, and built credits across Broadway, film, dance, and opera. He taught theater at Indiana University South Bend. Then he went to MIT Sloan for an MBA and started building companies. He founded IndigoH2O, a multi-award-winning alkaline water brand that made it to the Oscars and the MTV VMAs. He launched a 3D-scan-to-print eyewear company that raised $1M on Indiegogo. He designed the Creative Entrepreneurship program at Emerson College.

Today he is a Research Scientist at Autodesk Research, where he previously served as AI and Market Intelligence Lead. He has spent his career in the gap between the people who make things and the people who decide what gets made.

For more than a decade he has spoken on the business of art: how creative training becomes an entrepreneurial advantage, and what AI changes about that. He has presented at Oxford, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Juilliard, Syracuse, and Tufts, and has been a recurring speaker and guest lecturer at Yale since 2017. He has mentored founders through Yale Tsai CITY, MIT Sandbox, and MassChallenge. His work has appeared in Forbes, Wired, Bloomberg, CNBC, Inc., the Boston Globe, and Variety.

He is writing Everything But Taste: Why Artists Will Rule the AI Economy. The argument is simple. AI can do everything but taste. And taste can be trained.