Piper Anderson

Change Agent, Consultant, Entrepreneur, Idea generator, Writer/Editor

Piper Anderson is a storyteller, coach, trainer, and Founder of Create Forward, a social impact firm delivering experiences that advance equity and justice. In spring 2016, Anderson was awarded a TED Residency to develop an innovative storytelling project called Mass Story Lab. Mass Story Lab has traveled to more than thirteen U.S cities making the stories of people impacted by incarceration an instrument of justice. In her TED Talk, "Can Stories Create Justice?”, she challenges us to throw out punitive notions of justice and imagine a justice system that builds and restores humanity. Best known for her masterful facilitation, she is in high demand nationally for her training, speaking, and consulting with institutions on how to make workplaces and communities more inclusive and equitable. Her work has been featured in FastCompany, Audible for Business, Stanford Social Innovation Review, HuffPost, Catapult, and more. Piper Anderson is a Professor at NYU’s Gallatin School and a founding member of the advisory board and faculty of NYU’s Prison Education Program. She has guest lectured at universities across the country including Harvard Law, Columbia University, Georgetown, and the New School. She is a New School Writing Democracy Fellow, a Culture Push Fellow for Utopian Practice, a Civic Hall Organizer in Residence, and the Laundromat Project's 2021 Radical Imagination Fellow. Piper Anderson has dedicated her life to providing leaders with the generative spaces and tools they need to build the kinds of communities they want to live and work in.

Designing experiences for meaningful connection, participatory decision making, and creative problem-solving. Advancing racial equity and justice

Applied Theatre, Community Engagement, Community Healing, conflict transformation, Cultural Organizing, Group Facilitation, organizational change, Public Memory, racial equity, Storytelling

I randomly came across the application for the TED residency program on my Facebook newsfeed. I put it aside for a few weeks and then as the deadline approached decided to open the application. I'm so glad that I filled it out and shared my idea. It's an honor to be apart of the inaugural class of TED Residents. This is such a unique opportunity to be apart of a dynamic community of visionaries with break-through ideas working to create change in the world. That is just the kind of company I need to be in to realize my vision and powerfully share it with the world.