Leila Conners Petersen is co-founder and president of Tree Media Group. With a background in international politics, Leila set out to build a production company that tells stories about the pressing issues of our time. Founded in 1996, Tree Media creates media to support and sustain civil society. Leila writes and produces projects for various media: from film, to television, to the web and print.

In Leila's capacity as President of Tree Media, she oversees development and production that includes subjects that range from political to social topics. Tree works with groups and individuals like the Council on Foreign Relations, NASA, RAND, Gorbachevs Green Cross International, Leonardo DiCaprio, PBS and Norman Lear. As a writer, Leilas work has been published widely, in newspapers around the world from the International Herald Tribune, to the Los Angeles Times and Le Monde, to magazines like Wired and book compilations. Most recently, Leilas essay Glossy: American Hegemony and the Culture of Death, was published in War, Media and Propaganda, by Rowan and Littlefield.


Prior to Tree Media, Leila was Associate Editor of New Perspectives Quarterly, an international journal of social and political thought, and Associate Editor of Global Viewpoint of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, an internationally distributed op-ed column that reaches 200 papers. At NPQ, she interviewed thinkers and policy makers including: Kofi Annan, Nafis Sadik, Betty Friedan, Hans Bethe, Rigoberta Menchu Tum, Boutros Boutros Ghali among others. She is now Editor-at-Large for NPQ.


In 1991, Leila translated Jacques Attali's book from the French for Random House entitled, Millennium.


Leila is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Pacific Council on International Policy. She is a member of the Writers Guild of America (WGA). She was also a speaker at the Bioneers conference in October 2005. Leila speaks French, and lives in Santa Monica with her husband Matt and her son Aidan Michael.
The Soka Gakkai International (SGI-USA) Culture of Peace Resource Centers in New York, Santa Monica, Chicago Washington D.C., and Honolulu have launched the Culture of Peace Distinguished Speaker Series to engage people in a dialogue on the values, attitudes and behaviors that reject violence and inspire creative energy toward the peaceful resolution of conflicts. Lecturers in this series focus on one or more of the 8 action areas defined by the 1999 United Nations Declaration and Program of Action on a Culture of Peace: (1) Fostering a culture of peace through education, (2) Promoting sustainable economic and social development, (3) Promoting respect for all human rights, (4) Ensuring equality between women and men, (5) Fostering democratic participation, (6) Advancing understanding, tolerance and solidarity, (7) Supporting participatory communication and the free flow of information and knowledge and (8) Promoting international peace and security.

We hope that this eclectic and thought-provoking series of dialogues will empower community participants with a heightened awareness of the subtle shifts in our attitudes and behaviors that can help attain and sustain a culture of peace and to apply what they have learned in meaningful ways to their families, schools, workplaces and local communities. This annual lecture series begins on January 26 of each year to commemorate the founding of the Soka Gakkai International and the yearly publication of a peace proposal by SGI President Daisaku Ikeda. All lectures are free and open to the public.