Maestro of Next Wave’s powerful closing session, Aithan Shapira (MFA PhD) is an internationally acclaimed artist and Lecturer at MIT Sloan. As facilitator and executive coach, he draws on 20+ years of experience helping individuals and organizations to unlock their creative capacities in order to innovate at the speed of change. He is the Founder of Making to Think, a pedagogy for change that is enabling global organizations, governments, and Fortune 100 leaders to create conditions—strategic, structural, behavioral—for enduring cultures of innovation. Aithan serves McKinsey's think tank on Advancing Adult Learning and Development and has pioneered progressive curricula at the edge of leadership and skills retraining for the future of work at MIT Sloan, Harvard iLab, Stanford d.school. and Berklee Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship. Aithan developed his research on the creative process at the Royal College of Art & Design, lived in an Australian Aboriginal community for three years to study art’s impact on cultures of survival, and continues to be a visiting critic at arts institutions internationally and exhibit his artwork in museums and galleries in New York, London, and Miami.
