Award-winning storyteller Erin Prather Stafford believes in the transformative power of creativity as a force for change. Her work asks who creates the narratives that shape society, and how those narratives influence the way women and girls imagine their possibilities and understand themselves.

Erin founded Girls That Create as a free resource to help parents and caregivers nurture girls’ creative potential. Before that, she served as Executive Producer of the PBS Independent Lens documentary “Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines,” which traces Wonder Woman’s cultural legacy while examining how media portrayals of powerful women shape society.

Today, that same question of whose stories surface, and whose voices are heard, drives her research. As a doctoral student in SMU’s Doctor of Liberal Studies program, where she also works in research communications, Erin studies how digital narratives and AI are reshaping content, identity, and authority online, with particular attention to how girls and women experience these systems and the futures they’re able to imagine.