Co-Founder, President & Chief Culture Officer at Imaginology
Chris is a visionary creative leader and educator who inspires courageous curiosity in audiences through playful, kind, and disruptive workshops and experiences. His vision is to usher in a new age of enlightenment in a world more unified through creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration.
After attending Art and Design School at Illinois State University, he worked his way up at Disney Parks from serving ice cream to becoming a designer and art director. To his surprise, he found the creative and the business teams were constantly at odds, but he turned this obstacle into an opportunity by offering up his skills. His impact swiftly led him to the seat of Disney’s Global Creativity and Innovation Director.
In his new role Chris partnered with senior executives across all segments of the Disney company, using a ‘learning through doing’ approach to foster collaborative creativity and human-first innovation. His leadership impacted multiple departments including sales, finance, legal, operations, art, story and products, across Disney Parks & Walt Disney Imagineering to Pixar, Disney Studios, ABC Studios and Disney Interactive.
Today his approach is still firmly rooted in courageous curiosity—which he calls “Daring Play”—integrating the latest advancements in design thinking, mindfulness, and collaboration, placing him at the frontier of how we create together.
After Disney, Chris co-founded Imaginology, a company that guides creative collaboration workshops and design sprints. His recent partnerships span a diverse group of professionals, from Oscar-winning producers and animation directors to Fortune 500 leaders, academic researchers, psychologists, and even surgeons.
Chris’s transformative impact on people and teams extends across 24 countries through his captivating and thought-provoking keynotes and workshops. His uniquely interactive and entertaining style, along with his kind yet rebellious attitude, inspires real change at both a personal and professional level.
Featured in: Top 5 Tech Keynote Speakers to Book in 2023
