Speaker Spotlight
She Was Given a Two Percent Chance of Survival at 19. Three Months After a Kidney Transplant, She Was Back on a Snowboard.
Amy Purdy — 3-Time Paralympic Medalist · New York Times Bestselling Author · Dancing with the Stars Finalist
At 19, Amy Purdy went to the hospital with what she thought was the flu. On the way she went into respiratory and multiple organ failure. Doctors gave her less than a two percent chance of survival, put her on life support and placed her in a medically induced coma.
She lost her spleen, both kidneys and both legs below the knee. A week before her 21st birthday she received a donated kidney from her father. Three months after that transplant she entered the USASA National Snowboarding Championship and won medals in three events.
She went on to help pioneer the U.S. Paralympic Snowboarding Team and became one of the most decorated adaptive snowboarders in Team USA history.
She Built the Feet That Did Not Exist Yet
The detail that tends to stay with audiences is not the medals. It is what happened before them. When Amy went looking for prosthetic feet built for snowboarding, she found that nobody made them. So she worked with her leg maker and built them herself.
That is the through-line of her keynote, and it is why she plays as well to an engineering or innovation audience as she does to a general session. Her story is not really about recovery. It is about what you do when the standard solution does not exist and the plan you had stops working.
Her speaking career started in 2011 with a nine-minute talk at TEDx Orange Coast called Living Beyond Limits. TED put it on the homepage of TED.com and it has since passed two million views. A Goalcast video of her story has passed twelve million.
That question, the one she asked herself in a hospital bed at 19, is the one she hands the audience at the end.
Why Planners Keep Booking Her
Amy toured the country with Oprah Winfrey on The Life You Want Tour. She starred in a Toyota Super Bowl commercial narrated by Muhammad Ali that has been named one of the top 20 Super Bowl spots of all time. She finished as runner-up on season 18 of Dancing with the Stars with Derek Hough. Her memoir On My Own Two Feet became a New York Times bestseller and has been published in ten languages, and her second book, Bounce Forward, came out in April 2026.
All of that is name recognition, and name recognition sells tickets. What keeps her on stages is the survey data afterward.
She has been booked by Microsoft, Pfizer, Salesforce, Toyota, Intuit, Johnson & Johnson, UnitedHealth Group, Lululemon and Disney. She stays for the book signing and talks to everyone who walks up.
Two Keynotes, Two Different Rooms
Live Beyond Limits is her signature. Forty-five to sixty minutes, opening or closing, built for annual conferences, sales kickoffs, leadership summits and any room that needs lifting.
Bounce Forward is drawn from her 2026 book and from a later injury that once again threatened her ability to walk. It is the more practical of the two, built around twenty-one tools, and it fits organizations in the middle of change, healthcare and frontline workforces, and wellbeing programming.
Amy also co-founded Adaptive Action Sports with her husband Daniel Gale, a nonprofit introducing youth and wounded veterans with disabilities to action sports, which makes her a natural fit for accessibility and inclusion programming as well.
Book Amy Purdy
Available for keynotes on resilience, overcoming obstacles, creativity, change and purpose, plus fireside chats, book signings and VIP meet and greets.