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Piper Anderson is an award-winning storyteller, master facilitator, and writer who has dedicated her life to providing leaders with the generative spaces and tools they need to build thriving communities and organizations. 

She is the Founder of Create Forward, a social impact firm delivering creative experiences that advance equity and justice. In 2016, Anderson was awarded a TED Residency to develop Mass Story Lab, an innovative storytelling project implemented in over thirteen US cities that makes the stories of people impacted by incarceration an instrument of change. She is also co-founder of the Rikers Public Memory Project, an oral history project documenting the legacy of Rikers Island. Previously, she was a Professor at NYU’s Gallatin School and a founding member of the advisory board and faculty of NYU’s Prison Education Program for more than ten years.

Piper has received several recognitions for her work, including being named a New School Writing Democracy Fellow, a Culture Push Fellow for Utopian Practice, a Civic Hall Organizer in Residence, a TED Resident, Aspen Ideas Scholar, and the Laundromat Project’s first Radical Imagination Fellow.  Piper’s writings about organizational culture, racial equity, and community healing and accountability have been featured in FastCompany, Audible for Business, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Catapult, Huffington Post and more. 

Piper has also spoken on hundreds of stages across the U.S. since 2002, from Harvard Law to Columbia University to Omega Institute’s Women & Power to TED, delivering inspiring talks that share practical tools about how to shift the paradigm of leadership toward shared authority and collective action, creating work culture where everyone can thrive, and using community storytelling strategies to catalyze collective action. 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.