A speakers bureau that represents the best original thinkers,
writers, and doers for speaking engagements.
We can solve our biggest personal and social challenges with art, collaboration, and a willingness to turn ideas into action.
When you run up against a personal, organizational, or social problem that seems too big to tackle, how do you solve it? You make art, says Michael Townsend. Michael is a celebrated visual artist and is featured in Secret Mall Apartment, one of the most instantly memorable and widely discussed documentaries of 2026—a mainstay of Netflix’s hard-to-crack Top 10 List. In customizable, boundlessly energetic talks, he offers a fresh perspective on art as a force for connection and collaboration, showing audiences how to tap into their own creativity, how to work within boundaries (and when to push against them), and how to find unexpected and surprising solutions to the things they want to change. He draws on his art career, which has been covered by outlets like The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and The New York Times, as well as his three decades conducting workshops for audiences ranging from grade-school students to C-suite executives, including 10 years at General Electric’s Leadership Development Center. “I want audiences to walk away knowing that the capacity to use art as a tool for solving problems is already within them,” he says, “and that the opportunity to make art is absolutely everywhere.”
Michael Townsend is most famous for his artworks featured in the award-winning documentary Secret Mall Apartment. These artworks and the process of making them have been seen by millions of viewers and are the lived embodiment of collaboration as a catalyst for action.
Michael draws on everything. He’s the founder of the Tape Art movement and the first practicing tape artist—for over 35 years he has been spearheading collaborative drawings using low-adhesive tapes that can be stuck on facades, sidewalks, walls, and any other surface without permanent repercussions. The drawings started as nightly guerrilla raids on the surfaces of Providence, Rhode Island and, as interest in these ephemeral works has grown, he has been invited to perform over 500 of his Tape Art creations on walls around the world. His work with the Tape Art medium has optimized his efforts as a community artist and he has worked collaboratively with over 60,000 students both young and old. The uniquely accessible nature of his teaching practice has made this participatory work a good fit for hospitals, psychiatric facilities, nursing homes, prisons and communities struggling to have their voices heard.
He and his collaborators became an international curiosity when it was discovered that they were building a fully-functioning apartment space inside the Providence Place Mall that they had occupied, undiscovered, for four years. The footage Michael filmed during that period became the basis of the award-winning documentary Secret Mall Apartment, which was produced by Jesse Eisenberg. It entered Netflix’s top 10 on its first day on the streaming site, and was watched by millions of people during the 9 days that it spent on that list, clocking in at over 288 million minutes watched. Secret Mall Apartment was named one of Vogue’s best documentaries of 2024 and one of Vulture’s top 10 movies of 2025. Vulture praises it as “deliriously entertaining and moving,” while Chicago Tribune calls it “consistently, thoughtfully engaging. And, yes, often very funny.”
Beyond Tape Art, Michael has taught collaborative art-making for decades in both formal and informal settings. He taught art to undergrad and pre-college students at Rhode Island School of Design for seven years. He then completed a Masters in Art Education with a focus on community art. For 10 years, he developed and facilitated collaboration workshops at General Electric’s John F. Welch Leadership Development Center working with participants from new hires to executive band. When he is not pressing tape onto walls, Michael can be found in front of a computer editing footage from his films, choreographing short dance pieces, creating a subterranean sculpture or working relentlessly on one of his epic secret projects.
We all face problems that seem too big for one person to solve—from corporate innovation challenges to large-scale social issues. But Michael Townsend says that with a shared goal and some “good trouble friends,” any of us can make real change.
Michael is one of the artists behind the award-winning documentary Secret Mall Apartment, and has spent nearly four decades pioneering and teaching the craft of tape art to over 60,000 people. In this fun, inspiring, and fully customizable talk, he draws on his vast and celebrated body of artwork, walking audiences through the simple process of intention, iteration, feedback and action. Audiences will learn:
This talk is a must-listen for any audience facing changes or challenges: from high school students to urban planners to C-suite executives, and everyone in between. Audiences walk away inspired by Michael’s work, excited to make some “good trouble” of their own, and equipped with a roadmap for turning their wildest imagination into reality.
When you’re standing in front of a blank wall with nothing but a roll of tape, you only have yourself and your team to rely on—and that can be a powerful tool for breakthrough innovation.
Michael Townsend spent a decade developing and facilitating workshops at General Electric’s leadership center, eventually working exclusively with the company’s top 3,000 executives to get to the heart of how they actually work. Drawing on 35 years of experience creating art and teaching audiences to develop their own creativity, he offers a fun, interactive, powerfully illuminating workshop that can be fully customized to your team and your training curriculum.
In this session, Michael and his colleagues walk you through the process of creating your own tape art murals, showing you the creative and leadership skills you already have while offering you the tools to develop them further. Audiences leave the workshop better able to:
