Cleo Abram

Cleo Abram is a video journalist and a popular content creator.

She has more than 1.5 million subscribers on her eponymous YouTube channel.

Introduction-

Cleo Constantine Abram was born on 25 January.

She grew up in Washington, D.C. surrounded by doctors, lawyers, and politicians.

Cleo grew up watching Star Trek.

Education-

She did her schooling from Sidwell Friends School, a Quaker day school.

After completing her schooling in 2011, Cleo moved to New York to attend Columbia University.

While studying at university, she was very interested in global politics and loved studying science and political science.

Cleo graduated in 2015 and majored in political science.

From 2011 to 2015, she was a founder and co-Curator of TEDxColumbiaCollege.

After graduation, thanks to her love for global politics, she wanted to work in the foreign service.

Career-

After graduating, in January 2015, Cleo started working as a Senior Associate at Precision Strategies, a political consulting firm in New York.

She worked here until October 2016.

Cleo ran her own political news newsletter project, ‘The Short Version.’

She wanted to work in the foreign service but realised that she didn’t have the necessary skill level; so, she dropped this idea.

Cleo realized journalism to be a good career match for her, as she was confident of her skill of synthesising complex information and sharing it in an easily digestible way to the people.

At the time, she was a reader of Vox and loved their unique explainer journalism and decided to get a job at Vox.

But as Cleo didn’t have any experience in journalism, she persuaded them to hire her on the business side of Vox.

In November 2016, she secured the job as a Manager of Development at Vox in New York.

At Vox, Cleo helped write the pitch deck which helped Vox to sell its first show, ‘Explained’ to Netflix.

She also helped in launching Vox’s daily podcast, ‘Today, Explained;’ her job also involved pitching TV shows and launching new sections for Vox.

Video production at Vox-

After the ‘Explained’ show got greenlit by Netflix, Cleo was elated, as it was the first big streaming show that Vox ever sold.

But this happiness was short-lived as she realised that the ‘Explained’ show would be produced by people skilled in video storytelling and as she didn’t have that skill, she couldn’t take part in its production.

At that moment, Cleo decided to acquire the required skills and become a video journalist.

So, she started taking night classes at School of Visual Arts in New York and learnt editing in Adobe Premiere Pro and animation in Adobe After Effects; this allowed her to produce videos.

Cleo studied for a year at School of Visual Arts and also at Columbia Journalism School.

From October 2017, she started working as a Video Producer and Host at ‘Racked,’ a part of Vox Media family, which focused on fashion and fashion news.

Cleo also wrote, produced, and hosted ‘Model Citizen,’ a series about the intersection of political issues with the fashion industry.

She worked in ‘Racked’ until May 2018; at that time, ‘Racked’ stopped publishing; but she made the case to Vox to allow her to continue making videos.

At that time, Cleo was working as a Manager of Development at Vox and started producing videos for the Vox YouTube channel on the side, during nights and weekends.

She was also a scriptwriter at Vox and was nominated for an Emmy.

Cleo was a sole host for ‘Answered,’ Vox’s first daily show and wrote articles on Vox website.

Producing a Netflix show-

Vox offered anyone producing videos at Vox to pitch episode ideas for the second season of ‘Explained.’

As Cleo was producing videos, she pitched a few topics and one of them (Diamonds) got greenlit by Netflix.

So, from February 2019 to July 2019, she wrote and produced Coding and Diamonds episodes of ‘Explained;’ which got streamed on Netflix.

From July 2019 to December 2019, Cleo was a producer and host for ‘Glad You Asked,’ YouTube Originals.

She worked as a producer and host for Vox until January 2022 and learnt everything about video production, which later helped her in the success of her own YouTube channel.

Going independent; launching ‘Huge If True’-

In January 2022, Cleo quit her job at Vox and launched her own show ‘Huge If True’ on her eponymous YouTube channel and TikTok.

Her premise with her show is to produce the kind of explainer videos which she used to produce for Vox and focus on big ideas and technologies which have the potential to make the world better.

And cover their working mechanisms, people’s perceptions, and organisations or people behind those optimistic technologies.

Cleo’s videos mostly cover tech and economics.

As of October 2023, she has 1.55M subscribers on her YouTube channel.

And has 734K followers on Instagram and 41.9K Followers on X (Twitter).

Cleo earns from advertisements on her YouTube channel and sponsorships.

She films her videos with a Sony Alpha a7S III camera and records sound with Sennheiser SK AVX.

Personal life-

In July 2021, Cleo married Zachariah Reitano.

He is a co-founder & CEO of Ro.

Cleo lives in New York, United States.

She loves watching football and is a fan of Sci-Fi and Star Trek.

District 9 is her favourite science fiction film.

Cleo is a bibliophile.

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