Chris Anderson, TED Curator

Chris was born in a remote village in Pakistan, and spent his early years in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, where his father worked as a missionary eye surgeon. He graduated from Oxford University with a degree in philosophy, and then trained as a journalist. After several years at newspapers and radio stations, he got hooked on computers. He became an editor at one of the UK’s early computer magazines, and soon decided to launch his own.

Chris founded the UK company Future Publishing in 1985, and sold it to Pearson in 1994. By then he was based in the U.S., where he founded Imagine Media, publisher of Business 2.0 and other magazines, and creator of the popular games website IGN. He also founded the Sapling Foundation, which seeks ways of leveraging media, technology, market forces and the power of ideas to tackle tough global issues. Sapling acquired the TED Conference in 2001, and since then Chris has been spending most of his time on Sapling, TED and the TED Prize. [Back to the TEDBlog]