Gabo Arora is an award-winning filmmaker and Founder & Creative Director of LightShed, a virtual reality and social impact start-up. Formerly, he was a senior policy advisor and the UN's first-ever Creative Director, with over 15 years of humanitarian field experience, and has directed, produced and pioneered a series of widely acclaimed virtual reality documentaries (Clouds Over Sidra, Waves of Grace, My Mother's Wing, amongst others) for the United Nations that have all premiered at major film festivals around the world, including Cannes, Sundance and Tribeca, featured at the World Economic Forum in Davos, screened at the White House, and have exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art's inaugural program on immersive storytelling.

His latest VR experience, “The Last Goodbye”, commissioned by Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation, world premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival to wide acclaim with the LA times calling it “game changing” and “transcending all the typical barriers of rectangular cinema." It had its international premiere as an official selection at the 74th Venice Film Festival in Italy.

Gabo is currently an advisor at the New Frontiers Lab at the Sundance institute, designed and mentors Facebook / Oculus' VR for Good program, founded and launched HTC's 10 million dollar VR impact fund in support of the UN's development goals and manages a VR/AR portfolio for UNICEF's first-ever venture fund.

Gabo is also a professor at Johns Hopkins University where he has designed and will launch, in January 2018, an M.A. concentration on Immersive Storytelling and Emerging Technology (ISET) in the graduate film and media studies program.

A native New Yorker, Gabo holds honors degrees with distinction from NYU and Johns Hopkins University. He is a Davos World Economic Forum Arts and Cultural leader and was nominated for a term-membership at the Council on Foreign Relations by Francis Fukuyama. His work as been nominated for an Emmy, awarded a Cannes Lions, a Sheffield Doc/Fest award for best documentary and has been featured in the New Yorker, the British Film Institute's Sight and Sound magazine, Fast Company, New York Times and covered widely in the Guardian, BBC, Vice News, Wired, TED, NPR and PBS Newshour.