TEDx Windy City

Donald Marinelli is a tenured Professor of Drama and Arts Management at Carnegie Mellon University and is also the Executive Producer of the Entertainment Technology Center.

Professor Marinelli has been at Carnegie Mellon for twenty-nine years and was integral in creation of the university’s Master of Arts Management program, the Master of Fine Arts in Acting degree program with the Moscow Art Theatre School in Russia, and most recently, the Master of Entertainment Technology (MET) degree. Carnegie Mellon is the first school in the country to offer a degree program in entertainment technology.

The Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) is an internationally renowned initiative at Carnegie Mellon. Its emphasis is on bringing artists and technologists together to work on substantive, real-world projects combining the latest digital media technologies with myriad artistic, educational, and entertainment efforts.  The ETC has branch campuses in Silicon Valley, California, and Osaka, Japan. It has dual degree arrangements with universities based in Australia, Korea, Mexico, Portugal, Singapore, and Vietnam.

A native of Brooklyn, New York, Professor Marinelli completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Tampa. He received a M.A. in Clinical Psychology, specializing in Existential-Phenomenological Psychology from Duquesne University. Professor Marinelli subsequently attended the University of Pittsburgh where he received his Ph.D. in theatre history, literature, and criticism in 1987 with a dissertation on the early life and career of the Italian Futurist F.T. Marinetti.

His book about cofounding the ETC with the late computer science professor Randy Pausch, author of the critically acclaimed, The Last Lecture, will be published in the spring of 2010 by Sterling Innovation, a division of Barnes & Noble. Titled The Comet and the Tornado, the book recounts the six years Don and Randy shared an office creating the center that has become recognized internationally as Carnegie Mellon’s “Dream Fulfillment Factory.”