JOY FENNELL
Speaker · Creative Director · Artist
Beauty × AI × Creativity × Culture
UPCOMING SPEAKING APPEARANCES
PREVIOUS APPEARANCES
Fashion Group International’s Beauty + AI panel presented by L’Oréal Luxe
WHERE JOY HAS SPOKEN
MEET JOY
20 years in beauty.
A new creative life through AI.
A perspective shaped by both.
With a 20-year background in beauty and fashion, Joy spent much of her career as a high-fashion and editorial makeup artist, developing an intimate understanding of faces, skin, color, light, visual storytelling, and the collaborative process of constructing an image.
Today, she brings that trained eye into her work as an AI artist, creative director, cultural strategist, and speaker. As founder of The Future in Black™, she approaches AI as a creative material—exploring what becomes possible when we make room for imagination, curiosity, and play.
SIGNATURE TALKS · FEATURED
BEAUTY + AI
What Happens to Beauty When We Can Make Anything?
After nearly two decades working with real faces as a high-fashion and editorial makeup artist, Joy now explores what happens when beauty can be generated—and almost anything can be changed.
Drawing from beauty, AI, and creative direction, she examines synthetic beauty, representation, cultural context, authorship, and the human judgment behind the images we create.
Best for: Beauty · Fashion · Luxury · Creative Teams · Innovation
01. HOW AI SAVED MY LIFE
Reimagining Possibility Through Creativity and Technology
What happens when the way you’ve always created is no longer available to you?
Joy shares her journey from a 20-year career in beauty to discovering a new creative life through AI—and what that transformation taught her about creativity, identity, reinvention, and possibility.
Best for: Creative & Technology Conferences · Universities · Creative Teams · Leadership
02. CREATIVE DIRECTION IN THE AGE OF AI
When Everyone Can Generate, What Makes an Idea Worth Following?
When polished images can be generated in seconds, creative judgment becomes more—not less—important.
Joy explores the difference between generating and directing, and why taste, cultural intelligence, storytelling, editing, and point of view matter even more when creative possibilities become nearly infinite.
Best for: Brands · Agencies · Creative Leaders · Marketing · Innovation
03. CULTIVATING CURIOSITY & PLAY WITH AI
A Different Way Into Emerging Technology
A keynote and interactive workshop that replaces the pressure to master AI with curiosity, experimentation, and play.
Joy helps audiences move beyond simply learning what AI can do and begin discovering what they want to do with it.
Best for: Creative Teams · Innovation · Universities · Workshops · Professional Development
BEYOND
THE STAGE
Bring the conversation into the room.
Joy also leads interactive workshops designed to move ideas from the stage into the room—from hands-on explorations of creativity and AI to Play as Practice™, a discipline-agnostic invitation to step away from productivity, optimization, and outcomes and create simply for the joy of creating.
KEYNOTES · WORKSHOPS · PANELS · CONVERSATIONS
Planning a retreat or custom creative experience?
For teams looking to go deeper, Joy develops retreats and custom creative experiences through The Future in Black™.
JOY IN ACTION
See how Joy brings creativity, culture, and technology into the room.
About Joy
Joy Fennell is a creative director, artist, cultural strategist, and speaker working at the intersection of beauty, artificial intelligence, creativity, and culture.
With a 20-year background in beauty and fashion, she approaches AI as a creative material—using image-making, film, and speculative world-building to explore what becomes possible when we make room for imagination, curiosity, and play.
Joy is the founder of The Future in Black™, a cultural intelligence studio exploring futures through art, technology, and culture.
A perspective shaped by practice.
Adobe Firefly & Express Ambassador
OpenAI Artist
Runway Creative Partner
Represented by the Museum of Artificial Art (MoAA)
Her work has been featured in Chanel Arts & Culture magazine and NFT Magazine and exhibited in Florence, Art Basel, La Biennale, and Times Square with Art Innovation.
SELECTED RECOGNITION