Deepthi Welaratna is an award-winning writer, designer, and multimedia artist. She is the founder and studio lead of Tiny Little Cosmos.

She previously founded and led Thicket Labs, a civic tech venture featured in USA Today, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, and Fast Company, and incubated by Openbox, Startup Leadership Program, and the Transparent Collective. Her prior experience includes stints at creative agencies, consultancies, and startups specializing in communications, research, advertising, and design in San Francisco and New York.

She has designed civic engagement initiatives including California’s first statewide down-ballot progressive voter guide for Courage California, which reached one in 17 California voters in its first year, the national agenda-setting Lead With Love campaign for Movement Strategy Center, and a documentary on civil rights for all graduating high school seniors in California for the CA Secretary of State. Past speaking and facilitation engagements include the Magnum Foundation, the National Academy of Medicine, SXSW Interactive, and AIGA among others.

Her writing on professional development and the career journey has been commissioned by the Higher Education Recruitment Consortium, and she has previously written for the Stanford Social Innovation Review and KQED among other outlets. She began her career as an English teacher overseas.

Deepthi maintains an active multidisciplinary art practice. She releases music as a solo artist under the name Dark Spring Thunder and as part of the duo Society of the Wing and Scale with her husband and long-time creative partner Jon Bernstein (Disparition), whom she also represents through TLC. She has created sound and video design work for theater featured in venues across San Francisco, Oakland, and New York. She directed the music video “Wood” for Disparition and “My Home Is A Mountain” for herself. She has recently completed what she estimates to be the seventeenth draft of her first full-length novel called Lions Among Us.

Deepthi holds an M.A. degree in Media Studies from The New School, a B.A. degree in English with a minor in Computer Science from San Jose State University, and certifications in data analysis, finance, and teaching English as a foreign language. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a member of the Authors Guild. She lives in Los Angeles.