Sabrina Merlo

Sabrina brings good ideas to life. She is one of the creators of Maker Faire, the internationally recognized festival brand celebrating makers and creative culture. Sabrina developed the global network of community-driven Maker Faires that grew to 220 annual events in 44 countries, reaching over 1.4M people annually, and contributed on many levels of content curation and production of the flagship Bay Area and New York shows. During the 2020 COVID-19 supply chain crises, she helped stand up a nonprofit, Open Source Medical Supplies, to facilitate the global open source hardware community in emergency design and production of over 48 million pieces of needed medical supplies. More recently Sabrina has been consulting for the Ford Foundation, creating a new context for cross-field collaboration and strategy among public and private sector leaders working to modernize technology in the U.S. government.  She has also developed science and tech experiences for NASA and The Exploratorium; run brand building campaigns for MOTO Development Group and Code for America; and was on the founding Board of Directors for the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. Sabrina is a mom of two CalPoly SLO undergrads, Arlo and Ruby, and is a dedicated dahlia grower.