Erik Blankinship received his PhD in media arts and sciences from the MIT Media Laboratory. He has a master's from Harvard Graduate School of Education, and a bachelor of arts in English literature with honors from the University of Maryland at College Park, where he was a recipient of the Jim Henson Award for Projects Related to Puppetry. He has consulted for France Telecom, Motorola, Intel Research, and Ricoh Innovations on educational, assistive, and communication technology. While a student at MIT he was awarded an Intel fellowship, an Interval Research fellowship, and a Media Lab Europe fellowship.