Jody Turner

Futurist Jody Turner

Jody Turner is a U.S. West Coast-based entrepreneur and futurist known for her international brand anthropology insight and trend futurism research, writing[1] and keynote presenting.[2][3]

Biography

Born in the U.S. and raised in part overseas, Turner settled on the West Coast (USA) as a young adult. Turner received a Liberal Arts degree from The Evergreen State College[4] Olympia, Washington, a self-generating curriculum school, where her studies centered on the understanding of current-to-future human endeavors in design and culture.

Career

Turner began her professional career as a visual communications designer, working 15 years+ from San Francisco to New York City, including tenure as communications designer with Nike’s trend resource team. Subsequent design and trend insight work included consulting with Starbucks international retail brand teams and a full-time role instigating a trend library for The Gap/Old Navy with Ivy Ross. In 2003, Turner met Reinier Evers of Trendwatching.com at a round table in France, and cites this encounter as critical to launching her career as a trend hunter futurist.[5] That same year Turner founded her company Culture of Future (CoF).

Turner speaks at international conferences across the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Australia, and within developing nations. She is a regular speaker at the Sustainable Brands Conference in Istanbul. In 2009 she was awarded a World Brand Congress Brand Leadership Award in Mumbai [6] and has worked on numerous global projects focused on empowering women and girls, including the Nike Foundation Girl Effect[7] out of London, and the Forbes Girl Quake project with Denise Restauri.[8]

In 2010, Turner mentored then-Creative Studies design student Veronika Scott, and assisted her in the founding of American humanitarian project the Empowerment Plan. The organization provides employment and training to homeless women as they hand-make sleeping-bag coats distributed to the homeless of Detroit, as well as globally via disaster relief programs.

Turner is a strategic insights writer for Fast Company Magazine,[9] the Stanford Social Innovation Review,[10] GOOD Magazine[11] and Shareable.net.[12]

Boards & Associations

References