Lori Terrizzi is the CEO/Founder and Site Architect of GOALOOP – The Goal Market®, Connecting the World through Goals®. Terrizzi holds an MFA in Film from Columbia University and is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Rutgers College, where she was awarded the Vanderbilt Scholarship for the Study of Art & Music. Goaloop is the product of her life-long focus on freedom, issues of identity, and study of the relationship between words and images, form and content, equity and ability, truth and memory, power and substance, one of us and all of us.
Founding client of Yale Law School's Entrepreneurship & Innovation Clinic, Goaloop is patent pending and answers a fundamental question: Will today's interconnectivity become a web of surveillance that traps us as prey, or a trellis that supports growth toward fulfillment? Goaloop ensures the latter: a personal trellis for each of us, connected to build a better world for everyone. Goaloop helps you reach your goals and connects the world through goals.
Goaloop is an outgrowth of Terrizzi's prior position as Executive Director of the non-profit organization of writers aiding writers, founded by Board Member Salman Rushdie, continuing the work of the International Parliament of Writers in the United States. Principally working with the organization's VP, Board Member Caryl Phillips, the Board of Directors also included President Russell Banks, Carolyn Forché, Jayne Cortez, Derek Walcott, Michael Ondaatje, Dionne Brand, and Wole Soyinka, with Advisory Board Members Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood.
While protecting the creative freedom of artists writing in dozens of languages, the Internet was becoming a new 'language.' "Scaling" entered the lexicon. What were we scaling? Would it turn everyone into a 'persecuted writer?' How could we rewrite the semiotics of the Internet to help everyone achieve freedom?
These questions dovetailed with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, where Terrizzi had previously worked, provoking her imagination to conceive a new, accessible, transparent market. While at Lehman, she worked on a project with Ernest Green of the Little Rock Nine, deepening his transition from the non-profit sector to Wall Street. She then produced for American Movie Classics on a weekly television show awarded the Emmy® for Best Series in its category for two consecutive years, before founding a non-profit film platform on the eve of YouTube, mentored by Carnegie Corporation president Vartan Gregorian. Terrizzi channeled these experiences to design Goaloop – The Goal Market®, a new cross-sector marketplace where the only cost of entry is a goal – and where every goal becomes a Govie™, an automatic, editable 'goal movie.'
The story Raising Liberty: The Construction of the Statue of Liberty as Reconstruction Was Under Attack served as a metaphor for the construction of Goaloop.
The granddaughter of Armenian Genocide survivors and Sicilian immigrants, and the daughter of first-generation professors, Terrizzi was raised in Amherst, Massachusetts. "What does ERA mean," she asked her mother when three. Professor Terrizzi explained 'equality' by using the example of men holding open doors for women, seldom vice-versa. From then on, Terrizzi looked for men heading to a door and ran past them to push it open, thinking that one more door opened by a woman for a man would 'even' everything out: Equality, achieved.
To build upon the freedoms she was born into, Terrizzi formed a mission from a young age: Artistic freedom for all. Believing "no one is free until we all are free" makes equality a prerequisite for freedom. Artistic freedom is elusive without economic freedom.
Moving to Florence, Italy for a semester in high school was a formative experience; Renaissance men were known, but not one mention of a Renaissance woman; art was woven into life, not relegated to museums; exams at Le Scuole Pie Fiorentine were verbal "interrogations" in front of the class in Italian, and the curriculum included Design. Terrizzi later bypassed scholarship opportunities to study architecture at RISD and biomedical engineering at Rutgers, called instead to study history through art.
A pivotal experience: a full-time internship at the Art Commission of the City of New York during the AGBU summer internship program — participating in an outdoor sculpture survey, cataloguing photographs of Dresden before World War II, listening to audio archives from WPA's Federal Art Project, and attending artists' proposals for public art and designs.
Having previously seen Manhattan only in films, this brand new city was a movie set whose streets showed history that Amherst had buried, calling Terrizzi to write her first screenplay, and to filmmaking.
She returned to Florence for her junior year abroad, including a sculpture apprenticeship with Luigi Galligani, where she also conducted field research for a study in psychology (her college minor), and was offered an artist residency.
Drawn to film's ability to sculpt time, project new ways of seeing, pursue understanding while developing characters in a technically demanding collaborative art form within the power of story, Terrizzi entered Columbia's MFA program in film, where she studied with professors Richard Peña, Vojtěch Jasný, Andrew Sarris, Molly Haskell, Brendan Ward, Barry Alexander Brown, Ralph Rosenblum, and Michael Hausman, among extraordinary faculty and peers.
Having grown up watching Martin Scorsese's early films in Amherst thanks to her father's film collection — of mainly Italian neo-realist films — the independent study during post-production on Scorsese's The Age of Innocence with Re-Recording Mixer and Sound Engineer Tom Fleischman, and sessions with Film Editor Thelma Schoonmaker, remains her most treasured film education — especially when it led to meeting Mrs. Catherine Scorsese, and speaking with her in a semi-dialect (while too shy to meet her son).
New York City delivered Mean Streets during the pandemic, as city lights dimmed. Terrizzi made Goaloop's forthcoming origin story video upon hearing Wynton Marsalis' Street of Dreams.
As VP of the new James Baldwin Society at Rutgers, Terrizzi had begun writing Mr. Baldwin a letter. He had agreed to attend the inaugural meeting; he died two months before. The letter remained unfinished — until she completed it in this video. The James Baldwin Estate granted Terrizzi permission to include an interview of Mr. Baldwin in Goaloop – Street of Dreams, which includes two screens:
The framework in which we operate weighs on us
too heavily to be borne and is about to kill us.James Baldwin
New York, 1963
Dear Mr. Baldwin,
We have grown a new framework.
Love,
Goaloop
Silicon Valley has organized itself not unlike the Hollywood Studio System, which for a time nearly outright 'owned' artists under contract; tech's assumption of ownership of our data, our voices — and more — was on the horizon.
Insisting on turning the privilege of becoming who you truly are into a right, and make it within everyone's reach, Goaloop fulfills Terrizzi's personal mission to support artistic freedom for all — utilizing technology for growth and innovation, instead of becoming more like the machines we create. Goaloop integrates AI while advancing Human Intelligence. Your data, your work, your voice — any and all of what constitutes you is your birthright.
At the center of Goaloop's origin story is Toni Morrison's rose, still atop a bookshelf in Manhattan, where Terrizzi resides.
