Speaker Spotlight
She Built an Independent Film Festival and Ran It for Nearly Two Decades. Google, JPMorgan Chase and Blackstone Now Book Her to Talk to Their People.
Kweighbaye Kotee — Founder of the Bushwick Film Festival · TEDx Speaker · Filmmaker, Writer and Entrepreneur
Kweighbaye Kotee founded the Bushwick Film Festival and has led it for close to twenty years. Independent cultural organizations are notoriously hard to sustain for even a few years, which makes running one for two decades a more serious operating credential than it first sounds.
Building something with no budget, no institutional backing and no guarantee anyone will show up is a specific skill. It is also the exact skill most corporate teams are being asked to demonstrate right now, under a different name.
She has spoken and moderated for Google, JPMorgan Chase and Blackstone, and delivered corporate programs for Lululemon, SAG-AFTRA and Société Générale.
The Founder Credential Corporate Audiences Underrate
There is a version of the entrepreneurship keynote that only works if the outcome was a large exit. It rewards scale and leaves most of the room out, because almost nobody listening is going to build a unicorn and they know it.
The more useful version is about endurance. Keeping something alive and relevant for nineteen years, through funding gaps, changing audiences and a pandemic that closed every venue, is a harder and more transferable lesson than a fast exit. It maps directly onto what a team is doing when they are asked to sustain a project past the point where the initial excitement has worn off.
She is a filmmaker and writer as well as a founder, which gives her a storytelling register that lands differently from a standard business keynote. That combination is why she works for creative and marketing teams as well as general audiences.
Where She Fits
She is a natural fit for employee resource group programming, culture and belonging events, women’s conferences, and creative or marketing organizations. Her track record with Google, JPMorgan Chase and Blackstone means she is comfortable in a corporate room rather than only a cultural one, which is not true of every speaker with an arts background.
She has also guest lectured at NYU, Northwestern and Pace University, so campus and student programming is well within range, as is a commencement or a next-generation leadership session.
Moderation is worth flagging separately. She has moderated for major financial institutions, and a genuinely good moderator is one of the hardest roles to fill on a conference agenda. If you have a panel that needs someone who can keep four executives on time and on point, that is a real option here rather than an afterthought.
Book Kweighbaye Kotee
Available as a keynote speaker, panel moderator and workshop facilitator on entrepreneurship, creativity, storytelling and building things that last.