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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 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…
Reciprocal Roof (Shed) by Ziggy Liloia is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 A lot has changed in the past few years, and it is high time for Creative Commons (CC) to be louder about our values. Underpinning our recently released strategic plan is a renewed call for reciprocity. Neutrality serves only the status quo and…
Astronomical Clock by olemartin is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. The team here at Creative Commons was delighted to publicly release our new organizational strategy on January 22, after almost a year of intensive team, community, and board consultations. For the next several years, our focus will be to: Strengthen the open infrastructure of sharing…