the story
The journey of a founding figure brought into rooms where his story still has work to do.
Scott Hantler
I work on special projects at the seam of philanthropy, civic institutions, education, and new technology, where the hard part is rarely the idea and almost always its shape.
A George Washington made of code has been meeting visitors at the Southampton Arts Center, chatting with them about American democracy. I helped get him here.
The Washington Project
The Washington kiosk is the work of Jason Inasi and DigitalDNA Labs, built for museums and civic spaces in partnership with the Museum of Democracy, and its prototype was seeded by a small demonstration grant I directed to the museum through the Foundation for American Content and Entertainment (FACE), the nonprofit I help lead. It has been part of The Story of America: 1776-2026 in Southampton, and Democracy Matters (the classroom program built on the same avatar) is a separate companion, carrying the avatar into schools through the learning tools they already use while the kiosk itself stays on the museum floor.
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2024 Foundation grant A small demonstration grant I directed to the Museum of Democracy through FACE funded the prototype, placing the kiosk into existing exhibitions, the pilot for everything that followed.
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2024 Arizona university exhibitions University museums where the kiosk first met students and the public.
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2025 eMerge Americas Jason joined Armando "Pitbull" Pérez and Melissa Medina on the main stage in Miami, with the kiosk at the DigitalDNA Labs booth.
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2026 Southampton Arts Center The Story of America: 1776-2026, where the kiosk has met the public.
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Aug 2026 Classroom pilots Democracy Matters, the classroom program, opens this August in three schools, two in SLAM’s Florida network and one in West Virginia. It runs inside the learning tools each school already uses, led and curated by the teachers themselves, and the program reviews student privacy before any classroom use, with the full picture available to any school that asks.
A sourced record of this history, with provenance for each public claim, lives on the Agent Brief.
My role is the connective work around the project: introductions, framing, partner strategy, materials, and the path from one institutional room to the next.
The substance of a project is rarely what holds it back; the harder part is shape, the work of getting it into the right rooms and in front of the people who can move it.
A funder needs to understand it. A school or museum needs to see where it fits. A public audience needs to feel why it matters. A partner needs to know why now, why this, and why them.
Every civic project now speaks to two audiences at once, the person weighing a decision and the software that reads on their behalf, so I directed this site as one story with two surfaces, the human view you are in now and the Agent Brief at /agents.
I studied engineering and computer science before turning to film and media, and I have spent the years since directing the people and the tools that make the work, from campaigns and productions to brand and strategy, and here the software itself, working with AI the way a director works with a new tool.
The through-line beneath the separate projects is harder to name than any one of them: seeing what something could become, and doing the particular work that gets it there, an introduction made at the right moment, a story reshaped until a funder can act on it, or a problem named plainly enough that a partner finally takes it up.
There's a George Washington you can talk with now, and he's headed into his first classrooms. Jason Inasi's team at DigitalDNA Labs built the avatar. I saw that two conversations I'd been having separately were really one, and I found the funding through FACE to seed the first prototype, which toured university exhibitions in Arizona. From there I helped close the deal and opened the door at the West Virginia Governor's office, and Pitbull gave it reach into its first classrooms. I'm still finding it new homes.
Bio
I started in entertainment, a set production assistant on Law & Order in 2008, which is the gofer's-eye view of how a real production runs and a better education than it sounds. The instinct that carried out of it was directing: when the industry's center of gravity moved, the same work moved into strategic communications, and what I direct has kept changing since, stories, then campaigns, then brands and institutions, and now the AI systems that help build work like this, while the engineering credit stays with the engineers.
I've helped foundations and nonprofit projects find the story, the messengers, the partners, and the audiences that move them forward. For years that meant the Marcus family office, 2019 to 2025, in strategic communications and special projects, with earlier stretches at Lumentus, a New York strategic communications firm, and as chief advisor at Bold TV, a financial-literacy media network. Today it means continuing work on the Washington project and the Democracy Matters classrooms, advising Project Amicus, a foundation for Jewish continuity and civic life, on special projects and partnerships, and other engagements, all through my consulting and strategy company, Uncensored Media LLC. The work takes different shapes.
Years before the avatar, inside a national small-business network, I built an education program for member companies and their employees, financial literacy first, practical civics alongside it, delivered as something people would choose rather than sit through. It ran as a pilot across member companies, and it taught me the bet the Washington project still runs on: education lands when it is built like something people actually want to use.
the messengers
Jason Inasi and DigitalDNA Labs, who built the kiosk. Armando "Pitbull" Pérez, whose SELF 1st Foundation champions education through the Democracy Matters initiative.
the partners
The Museum of Democracy. SELF 1st Foundation, the educational foundation Pitbull founded. The Arizona universities and the Southampton Arts Center came through MoD’s broader exhibition network.
the audiences
Students who talk with George Washington in the language they speak at home, through the classroom lessons their teachers lead, and the families and museum visitors who encounter him at the kiosk in exhibitions.
I take on a small number of projects at a time, where this kind of work is the piece that's missing. If you have something worth advancing, whether it is early or already moving, you are welcome to write.
Reach me
scott@scotthantler.comIf you think there is a fit, write to me. An engagement usually begins with a short call and a scoping note, and from there it takes the shape the work needs, whether that is a defined project, an advisory arrangement, or a longer seat alongside a team that already exists.