Ariel Beery is the co-founder and director of the PresenTense Group, as well as editor and publisher of PresenTense Magazine, and co-founder of the PresenTense Institute for socially-minded entrepreneurs. Ariel is also a widely-published columnist in over a dozen papers around the world including the Forward, the London Jewish Chronicle, the Jerusalem Post and Haaretz.

Ariel teaches and lectures at conferences worldwide, focusing on issues pertaining to the Jewish People, Zionism, and the impact of the Information Age on human communities. A summa cum laude graduate of Columbia University, and a graduate student at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Jewish Philosophy, Ariel is recieving a Masters in Public Administration from New York University in Nonprofit Management and a Masters in Judaic Studies.

Ariel was named one of the 10 Jews to Watch by the World Jewish Digest, along with Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg; was a finalist in the Brandeis University search for a Visiting Professor for Jewish Communal Innovation and, together with PresenTense co-founder Aharon Horwitz, was chosen to be an AVICHAI Foundation Fellow for the first cohort starting in 2008. Ariel Beery is the director of Strategy and Assessment for MavenHaven, a web-based start-up which connects speakers to the organizations that need them in the Jewish community.

Some more personal info:

Ariel was born and raised in New York City, and is a proud product of the New York Public School System--attending P.S.3, the Center School, and Stuyvesant High School.

Ariel was a member of the Hashomer Hatzair socialist-Zionist youth movement, served as the New York Regional Director in 1995, the General Secretary for Hashomer Hatzair in 1996. After a year at Wesleyan University he volunteered for a year of service to the movement in Israel, on Kibbutz Kerem Shalom, in 1998.

On Kerem Shalom, Ariel co-founded the First of May Project, later known as the Youth-to-Youth project, a Palestinian-Israeli umbrella youth movement that brought together youth movements from the socially-conscious left.

From 1999 till 2001, Ariel volunteered in the Israel Defense Forces, and served in the Nahal Brigade until he sustained an injury. He finished his service in the IDF Spokesperson's Unit, where he wrote and translated information packets and was, among other things, a speech-writer for the Advisor for the Minister of Defense for Arab Affairs, David Haham.