Erik Becker

Erik Becker is a three-time National Daytime Emmy-winning director, editor and executive producer with more than 20 years in documentary filmmaking and unscripted television. He is co-founder and managing partner of InkBlot Narratives, a St. Louis nonfiction studio with credits on Amazon Prime Video, HBO Max, Peacock, Discovery+, BET+ and Syfy. InkBlot has its own full post-production facility in Maplewood, Missouri.

Erik started as an editor, and that still shapes how he runs a show. He builds stories from the footage up, and he knows what the edit will need before shooting begins. Over the past decade InkBlot has refined a way of making shows with brands that audiences choose to watch. The most recent is A Different Breed with Purina, which won all three of its 2026 National Daytime Emmy nominations. Erik won Outstanding Lifestyle Program as an executive producer and Outstanding Directing for a Daytime Non-Studio Non-Fiction Series with Aaron Bowden, and he shared the award for Outstanding Editing for a Daytime Non-Studio Program as one of the series' editors.

Erik is also Chief Creative Officer of the Trace Institute, the consciousness research organization co-founded by cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman. There he is building Trace Media into a frontier science communication company that funds the research. He produced, directed and edited Traces of the Other, a conversation between Hoffman and Andrew Gallimore. It has passed 150,000 views on YouTube with no paid promotion. On his own initiative, he completed Stanford's Quantum Mechanics for Scientists and Engineers course.

Before InkBlot, Erik spent four years at Apple. He started as a creative trainer and went on to make internal marketing videos in Cupertino. He is an advanced AI user and runs a team of AI agents that handle research, coding, design and project management for InkBlot and Trace. He built and launched traceinstitute.org with them.