Our Speakers
Opening the Gateway for Visionary Voices ​
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​The Gateway Gathering & Pitch Fest brings together a powerful mix of emerging and established leaders who are ready to expand their influence and take bold steps toward bigger stages.
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Our lineup of powerhouse speakers have built platforms, curated pipelines to publishing, speaking, or media opportunities.
Joy Tutela
Literary Agent, David Black Literary Agency
A member of AAR, Joy Tutela has been with the David Black Literary Agency since 1998. Joy represents various genres of books, including projects in the following categories: narrative nonfiction, science, health, memoir, history, politics, self-help, investment, business, women’s and LGBTQ+ issues, parenting, humor, craft, cooking, lifestyle and entertainment, commercial and literary fiction, and middle grade and young adult.
She represents the New York Times bestselling authors Maggie Smith, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, Jenny Sanford, cartoonist Bob Eckstein, and Jackson Galaxy and Kate Benjamin’s Catification. She also represents the New York Times bestselling Atkins series, as well as David Kidder and Noah Oppenheim’s bestselling Intellectual Devotional series. Joy’s other bestselling authors include Stephen Puleo, Lisa J. Edwards, Kim Sun Sunée, and Kay Gardiner and Ann Shayne.
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Shabnam Mogharabi
CEO, Joy Brigade
Shabnam Mogharabi is an entertainment entrepreneur and producer with 20 years of experience leading mission-driven media companies. She cofounded the uplifting content studio SoulPancake with actor Rainn Wilson, which she ran as CEO for nearly a decade, amassing 1B+ video views and dozens of Emmy and Webby Awards, before a successful exit to Participant Media.
Currently, she is the founder and CEO of The Joy Brigade, a consulting and advisory firm that helps early- and mid-stage media, entertainment, and tech companies with strategy, business planning, culture, content creation, and storytelling. Shabnam sits on the board of multiple for-profit startups and non-profit organizations. She is also a highly sought-after public speaker on the subjects of positive psychology, joy, and purpose.
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Deborah Kohan
Senior Partner & Managing Director, FINN Partners
Deborah Kohan is a seasoned PR strategist with over three decades of experience navigating clients through the ever-evolving media landscape. As a Senior Partner and Managing Director of FINN Partner’s MEDIA CONNECT division, she oversees all the division’s operations, continuing to drive success for their clients.
Throughout her career, Deborah has executed high impact campaigns for a diverse range of clients spanning publishing, corporate entities, and non-profits. Her clients have included bestselling authors Lee Child and Kate DiCamillo, New Yorker Editor Robert Mankoff, The Cleveland Clinic, Tauck River Cruises and notable figures including President Jimmy Carter.
In addition she ensures her clients maximize the opportunities she secures for them. Her media training expertise has empowered C-suite executives from organizations such as The Body Shop, DirecTV, and New York University to become polished, media-savvy representatives of their brands.
Monique Ruff-Bell
Chief Program & Strategy Officer, TED
As an experienced executive leader with a demonstrated history of working in the media, events and publishing industry, Monique Ruff-Bell has over 20 years’ experience within brand leadership, marketing, and strategic growth.
As Chief Program & Strategy Officer for TED, she oversees TED’s flagship global events and conferences, TEDx programs and initiatives, global partnership sales and key marketing verticals for the organization. She plays a vital role in shaping and executing TED’s strategic plan, contributing to the advancement of its mission, operational excellence, and overall organizational growth.
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Jacquelyn Fletcher Johnson
CEO & Founder, The Gateway Project
Jacquelyn Fletcher Johnson is the founder of the Gateway Project and the CEO of the Heartwood Leadership Institute. She's a communications executive, content strategist, and executive coach.
Whether guiding C-suite leaders through messaging challenges, designing conferences for 2,000 executives, or coaching visionaries to build thought-leadership platforms, Jacquelyn Fletcher Johnson brings a unique blend of strategic rigor, emotional intelligence, and heart-forward storytelling.
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Called a "speaker whisperer," Jacquelyn has provided strategic counsel and executive messaging support to board members and senior leaders at Fortune 100 companies and global brands including Accenture, Amazon, Albertsons, Bissell, Coca-Cola, Deloitte, General Mills, Marsh McLennan, Microsoft, Target, Visa, Walmart, and more. In addition, she’s led strategy and execution for high-profile national events, internal communications rollouts, brand positioning campaigns, and executive speechwriting engagements.
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Samantha McKenna
CEO, #samsales
With over 120,000 LinkedIn followers, #samsales’ Founder and CEO, Sam McKenna, has spent her 15+ year career in Enterprise sales doing two things: breaking over 13 sales records. Sam holds an unparalleled amount of distinctions as a LinkedIn expert, including being one of few people to be a LinkedIn brand ambassador and LinkedIn Sales [In]sider.
She's created content since 2011, been an influencer on the platform since 2016, is a former Enterprise sales executive leader for LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator division, and was awarded the coveted Top Voice on LinkedIn award in 2024. Sam has also been named a Top 100 Global Sales Leader 2023, Top 50 Women in Revenue, Top 25 Women in Revenue, Top 20 Women in Sales Leadership, repeated recognition as both a 100 Best LinkedIn Influencers and a Top Ten LinkedIn Sales Star, amongst dozens of awards, and is frequently sourced as a keynote speaker for global brands. Since 2019, #samsales has scaled to multi-millions in revenue, having achieved 312% of their first year’s annual revenue goal and continued to have significant double-digit growth ever since.
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Holly Zelinsky
Founder & CEO, Nationally Speaking, Inc.
For more than 24 years, Holly Zelinsky and her team have helped organizations across the United States find the Right Speaker, with the Right Topic, at the Right Price for their meetings and conferences. Nationally Speaking, Inc. represents more than 200 speakers nationwide. Every day, Holly works closely with companies, associations, government agencies, banks, hospitals, and more, to secure their ideal Speaker, Trainer, Emcee, or Entertainer for their events. By learning each client’s goals and objectives, she provides targeted speaker recommendations, tailored to their needs. Making the perfect match is her favorite part of the job! Happy speakers who get booked, and happy clients who find their ideal speaker.
Last year, Holly launched a new division of her company called The Speaking Scoop. After helping hundreds of organizations find the right speakers, Holly has gained a unique insight into which speakers get booked, and which speakers are consistently overlooked. She has identified clear patterns behind these outcomes, and is passionate about sharing that knowledge with speakers. Holly has also guided many new speakers, at the start of their speaking careers, helping them build a successful professional speaking business. She saves them time and money by providing a clear, proven path to success.
Holly often says that, even after all these years, she still can’t wait to get to her office each morning because she truly loves what she does.
Dr. Simone Ahuja
Speaker & Author of Jugaad Innovation
Dr. Simone Ahuja blends the mindset of a human-centered strategist with the scrappy creativity of a startup founder, delivering a fresh, solutions-driven take on what’s next for innovation, resourceful problem solving and growth. With the agility of an improv performer and the practicality of someone who’s been in the trenches with global companies, she helps organizations turn uncertainty - including AI-fueled disruption - into their greatest advantage. Known for her candid yet compassionate high-energy style, Simone makes complex challenges feel refreshingly approachable, equipping audiences with simple, actionable tools
to drive real change.
She’s a trusted advisor to Fortune 500 leaders, founder of the innovation and strategy firm Blood Orange, and bestselling author of Jugaad Innovation and Disrupt-It-Yourself. Her mission? To democratize innovation - or as she puts it, to create “easier and better problem-solving for everyone regardless of title or resources,” so more people feel empowered, productive, and aren’t just ready for change – they’re equipped to lead it.
Her work has been featured in Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and Forbes, she’s been brought in by organizations like Google, SAP, Kaiser Permanente, P & G, Target and 3M to help solve complex challenges, accelerate innovation and build cultures of intrapreneurship (entrepreneurship in large organizations).
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Tara Jaye Frank
CEO, The Waymakers Group
Tara Jaye Frank is a workplace culture and leadership strategist who has advised and educated thousands of Fortune 500 executives across multiple industries and large member organizations. Her work, fueled by a deep belief in the creative power and potential of all, focuses on building bridges between people, ideas, and opportunity.
Before founding The Waymakers Change Group—a culture and leadership consultancy that helps mid-sized and large companies deeply understand their employee experience and build capacity to lead all people well, Tara spent twenty-one years at Hallmark, where she served in multiple executive roles, including vice-president creative writing and editorial, vice-president business innovation, vice-president multicultural strategy, and corporate culture advisor to the president.
Her last book, The Waymakers: Clearing the Path to Workplace Equity with Competence and Confidence (May 2022), is an invitation to those with power and position to open doors, remove barriers, and facilitate access and opportunity for all people.
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Santi Strasser
Resilience Architect
Santi Strasser is a Resilience Architect, building resilience one connection at a time. Raised in Argentina, he learned early that deep self-reflection accelerates growth.
Transforming his greatest childhood trauma into his life’s purpose, Santi helps individuals and teams thrive through trust, self-awareness, and purpose-driven action. His leadership approach integrates holistic thinking, emotional intelligence, and trust-building to strengthen resilience in people and organizations.
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Alison Fragale, PhD
Professor, Speaker, Author of Likeable Badass
Alison Fragale is an organizational psychologist, award-winning professor, international speaker, and author. In each of her roles, she's passionate about empowering people — especially women — to get what they want, at work and in life. Alison applies her academic and corporate expertise in negotiation, power, status and influence to individuals and organizations seeking enhanced effectiveness. Her clients are high-performing organizations and industry groups that understand the importance
of empowering their teams with cutting-edge, science-based strategies for success.
Alison is a tenured professor of Organizational Behavior and the Mary Farley Ames Lee Fellow at the University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School. Her academic research on negotiation, and the determinants and consequences of power, status, and hierarchy, have been published in her field’s top academic journals. She is also the author of Likeable Badass: How Women Get the Success They Deserve. Prior to her academic career, Alison worked as a consultant for McKinsey and Company, Inc.
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Cait Donovan
Global Speaker & Host of FRIED: A Burnout Podcast
Cait Donovan, host of "FRIED. The Burnout Podcast" and author of "The Bouncebackability Factor," is an expert in emotional intelligence and burnout prevention. With a Bachelor’s in Biobehavioral Sciences and a Master’s in Chinese Medicine, she uniquely combines scientific research with Eastern healing to holistically address burnout.
Cait's compelling keynotes at major conferences and Fortune 500 companies provide actionable insights, empowering professionals to reclaim balance and energy in their lives and companies to end the turnover, loss of productivity and lack of engagement that accompanies burnout.
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Sabra Meretab
Strategic Programs, Stripe
Sabra Meretab has spent her career building payments products and leading engineering teams in Fintech. She currently manages complex strategic programs in crypto at Stripe, and previously served as Chief of Staff and Technical Advisor to the Head of Payments Engineering, where she drove major architectural overhauls and shaped strategy across a 1,000-person org.
When she's not debugging technical infrastructure, she's debugging her own understanding of the world around her through writing. Sabra writes essays on ambition, burnout, and the achievement complex in her spare time and is currently working on publishing her first book, a memoir.
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Rachel Estes Leyk
Senior Account Manager, Stripe
Rachel Estes Leyk is fueled by curiosity, empathy, and an unshakable drive to solve meaningful problems in both business and life. Raised in Minnesota, she brings a strong Midwest work ethic to her work as a strategist and leader, shaped by an MBA and a career helping some of the world’s largest organizations navigate complex business and technology challenges. Rachel has held roles with companies including Slalom, Target, and Jostens, and now works in the enterprise cloud technology space, helping clients turn big ideas into practical, human-centered solutions.
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She is the author of Response – ABILITY, a book that offers a toolbox of strategies and practical tools, grounded in both research and real-life experience, to help kids intentionally respond rather than simply react. As a mother raising a child on the autism spectrum, Rachel blends real-world strategy with personal resilience. Her talks blend heartfelt storytelling with practical insight, inviting a powerful mindset shift that’s redefining how parents, caregivers, and educators love, care, support, and uplift. She equips audiences with the ability to intentionally respond rather than simply react, along with actionable frameworks, fresh perspectives, and the reminder that growth and compassion can and should coexist.