Rowena Alegría is Chief Storyteller for the City & County of Denver, founder and director of the Denver Office of Storytelling, the world’s only municipal storytelling, cultural preservation and narrative change project. She was Naropa University’s 2024 Cobb Peace Lecturer and the 2021 Ricardo Salinas Scholar in Fiction at Aspen Words. She’s writing a novel that plays with form and the history of the Southwest. With 20+ years’ experience leading diverse, high-performing teams, she helps organizations take new approaches to old problems and grow through innovation, technology and strategic thinking. As Chief Storyteller, she leads a team that’s brought resident voices and histories out of the shadows and onto big and little screens for more than half million people. At Alegría Communications, she consults and builds inventive strategies for engaging internal and external audiences around impactful multimedia storytelling and around equity, inclusion, diversity and belonging.