Stories shape the world.
Imagination shapes story.
The future belongs to those who dare to claim it.
Hi, I’m Catherine. I’m a storyteller.
I've followed the thread of story from academic philosophy to global entertainment, and everywhere I've followed that thread, I've found the same thing: that the most consequential opportunities and crises of our moment are those of story and the imagination. In a culture dominated by a Content Industrial Complex — the cultural economy that treats narrative primarily as an extractable resource — we’re missing connection to the deep mythic infrastructure that shapes and give space to what we can imagine. But when we tap into and expand that infrastructure, everything becomes possible. I want us to expand the imaginative horizons of what’s possible.
As a scholar of political philosophy, I studied the architecture of the dominant narrative system across myth and technology. As an entertainment executive (Head of Content and Editor-in-Chief of Disney's interactive media division), I supported the expansion — and one or two small subversions — of this architecture at global cultural scale. As a speaker, writer, and social entrepreneur, I work to reimagine the dominant narrative system, and to rewild human imagination — supporting the emergence of a mythic infrastructure that can hold the complexity and possibility of what comes next. I’ve done this with collaborators as varied as Disney and TED and Yo-Yo Ma and Team Beyoncé; with deep tech entrepreneurs and climate scientists and social activists and Gen Z YouTubers. I don’t have a favorite; if you have an active imagination and the will to act on it, you’re my people.
All of which is to say: I'm, like, totally obsessed with story and the imagination as technologies and as magic, and with what becomes possible when we deepen the intersection of these. Collaboration is my love language; my very favorite thing in the world is to co-create into an impossibly possible future.
Innovation won’t save us. Imagination will.
Innovation works within the possible; imagination expands what possible means. I explore the furthest edges of human possibility — and impossibility. This is the map that I’m unfurling:
The Story at the End of the World
All effective futurism must be narrative. There is a story ahead of us, waiting to be found, written, conjured — and it will mark the end of the current world and usher in a new one. What is this story? Who gets to tell it? How do we remember it? How do we begin it?
AI and How We Human
Artificial intelligence has been reared on stories. Its hallucinations are electric dreams. Our creative relationship to it seems to border on the real. What does this reveal about consciousness, authorship, and what story actually is — and what does this mean for how we human with, and beyond, the machines?
The Imagination Age
We keep calling the current global economic paradigm the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” — as if the best we can do is count iterations of old systems. But the industrial age is ending, not iterating, and what’s emergent is a different civilizational organizing principle altogether. What's the metaphor for what comes next? Not the algorithm. Not the network. Something older and stranger and more human: imagination itself.
The Matriarchal Imagination
The dominant story structures of our world were built by and for a particular kind of protagonist. What emerges when we go further back — to older ways of knowing, older mythic architectures, traditions rooted in reciprocity and relation rather than conquest and control? What becomes possible when we imagine from there?
Magic as Technology
Wonder is a cognitive technology, not a decorative sentiment. What ancient wisdoms and contemporary discoveries converge on the capacity for genuine enchantment — and what do we lose when we stop practicing it?
Pilgriming the Present
Everyone wants to be a futurist. But what does it mean to journey in place — to find that the most radical act is full presence in a world where the ground is always shifting? What is home when the terra firma keeps falling?
Once Upon A Story
Words
Interviews
Storytelling For Change
Talking To Robots About Storytelling (AI & Creativity)
Telling Complex Stories About Feminism
The Princess Industrial Complex
Select Projects
Contact Me
