Kate Langrall Folb, M.Ed., is director of Hollywood, Health & Society (HH&S), a program of the University of Southern California Norman Lear Center, and a veteran for more than 25 years in the entertainment education field. At HH&S, she leads a team of public health and media professionals to connect entertainment content creators with experts in health, science, safety and security to ensure accuracy in their depictions. At the Lear Center she has also conducted research on the impact of TV storylines on viewers’ knowledge, attitudes and behaviors. After an early career in television and music production, Kate joined the Scott Newman Foundation as director of special projects where she worked with top TV shows and films on portrayals of alcohol and other substance abuse, developed a media literacy program for middle and high school students and produced the foundation’s annual public service announcements (PSAs). Later, she served as director of The Media Project, a partnership of Advocates for Youth and the Kaiser Family Foundation, working with entertainment on storylines about HIV/AIDs and other sexually transmitted diseases, teen pregnancy prevention, condom use and sex education. She also produced the annual SHINE Awards for sexual health in entertainment and developed a cutting-edge media campaign for Viacom to normalize condom use and encourage healthy relationships. From 2001-2012 Kate led Nightingale Entertainment, an independent consulting firm garnering celebrity involvement, producing PSAs and coordinating national media events for a variety of health-related causes. She joined Hollywood, Health & Society in July of 2012.

Over her career she has overseen more than 10,000 consultations with top TV shows and movies in the U.S. and abroad on topics ranging from HIV to climate change to structural racism. Her work has been funded by government agencies including the CDC and the National Institutes for Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.