Joanna Choukeir

Deputy Director Creative Industries

Innovate UK, UKRI

Speaker Biography

Joanna Choukeir is Deputy Director for Creative Industries at Innovate UK, UKRI, where she leads the UK’s Creative Industries Growth Sector (IS-8). She is an executive and non-executive leader, entrepreneur, educator and systems innovator. For over 25 years, her leadership practice has centred on collective intelligence, imagination and action for societal and ecological impact. She applies systemic and creative thinking to bring people, ideas and organisations together around shared missions that no single organisation can achieve alone. Joanna is also Board Trustee of the Young Foundation, and founder of Design My Family Tree, a micro social enterprise supporting families and trees.

Prior to Innovate UK, Joanna was former Director at the Royal Society of Arts (RSA), where she led programmes spanning climate, communities, creativity, enterprise and education. Previously, she co-led Uscreates, growing it from a startup into an award-winning, multi-million-pound public innovation consultancy that was acquired by FutureGov and then TPXimpact shortly after. Joanna began her career in advertising and industrial design and was the first PhD researcher to apply co-design approaches to strengthening social cohesion in post-conflict communities.

Joanna lectures, supervises and mentors across a number of London’s creative universities, and regularly speaks and writes on systems innovation, creativity and collective impact. She has spoken at TEDx, the World Design Congress, Anthropy, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and DesignTO, and has published with the Club of Rome, Bloomsbury, Pearson, the Design Research Society and Future Observatory.

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