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Anna joined CC in 2019 as Director of Product. She was promoted to COO in 2021 and was appointed CEO in 2024.
Before joining CC, Anna spent a decade building out all aspects of the operations of three distributed performance marketing start-ups. She is constantly considering opportunities for expansion and improvement in the environment around her. She happily straddles the worlds of leadership, operations, and product.
Anna grew up in Iceland, Scotland, and Malawi, leaving home to study in Norway, the United States, South Africa, and back to Iceland. She now calls Austin, Texas her home, and settles for traveling instead of moving (for the time being). Sharing information and resources is central to how Anna operates, as she is convinced it leads to a better existence for everyone. Sharing ice cream is optional, but encouraged.
This month, CC will be represented at the AI Impact Summit in Delhi, an international gathering shaping the future of AI policy and practice. The 2026 Summit follows the AI Action Summit in Paris in February 2025, where CC underscored a simple but essential truth: without civil society, there can be no public interest.
In 2026, Creative Commons will continue to ensure that technological change strengthens, not erodes, the commons and improves the acts of sharing and access that are part of our everyday lives. We do this by applying first principles, practical strategies, and lessons learned from decades of advancing the commons. Sharing of research, educational materials, heritage, and creative works are acts of generosity—these are the gifts people give to the commons. Access to these same shared resources enables collaboration, innovation, and understanding. Together, this is how we improve access to knowledge and build a more equitable future. Â
This year marked the first year of a new strategic cycle for Creative Commons, and it began amid profound change. The ground beneath the open internet continues to shift. Powerful technologies, driven largely by multibillion-dollar companies, are reshaping how knowledge and creativity are shared online, concentrating power in the hands of a few and testing long-standing assumptions about openness and access.
At Creative Commons, we’ve long believed that binary systems rarely reflect the complexity of the real world—nor do they serve the commons very well. The internet, like the communities that built it, thrives on nuance, experimentation, and shared stewardship. That’s why we’re continuously working to introduce choice where there has been little, and to advocate for systems that acknowledge the diversity of values and needs across the web.
SXSW by Creative Commons is licensed under CC BY 4.0 If you’ve been following along on the blog this year, you’ll know that we’ve been thinking a lot about the future of open, particularly in this age of AI. With our 2025-2028 strategy to guide us, we’ve been louder about a renewed call for reciprocity…