Trained as an economist, Dr. Ashfaq Ishaq started his career at the World Bank where he co-authored a book on entrepreneurship published by the Oxford University Press in 1987. He joined the George Washington University as associate professor and later founded an international business in Washington, D.C. Steeped in the notions of commodities, markets, trades, and valuation, he experienced a transformation when he realized that the most valuable commodity of all – a child’s imagination – has no market value. And yet this imagination is the seedbed for discovery and innovation and the prosperity and wealth of nations.

Not only is creativity neglected in schools, but research shows that a precipitous drop in measures of creativity typically takes place around the 4th-grade. At this age children can also learn to be empathic as a building block for collaborative innovation. An artist when he was a child, Dr. Ishaq embarked on a mission to grow every child’s imagination, nurture creativity, and develop empathy through the arts. And so the International Child Art Foundation was born in 1997.

Dr. Ishaq holds the distinction of hosting the first-ever national children’s art festival in U.S. history, which was held on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. in 1998. He has since produced the World Children’s Festivals every four years, held also on the National Mall as the world’s largest celebration of children’s imagination and co-creation. An exceptional multi-disciplinary thinker, Dr. Ishaq has written for medical journals such as The Lancet and CyberTherapy & Rehabilitation, for periodicals on economics and business such as Finance & Development and the Institutional Investor, for political and cultural publications such as Journal of Conﬂict Resolution and Journal of Urban Cultural Research, and for educational reviews such as the State Education Standard and SchoolArts. He is editor and publisher of ChildArt magazine and the 2011 recipient of both The Ziegfeld Award of the United States Society for Education Through Art, and the Distinguished Service Award of the United States Sports Academy.