Rebecca Renner — Keynote Speaker
Storytelling, creativity, media, brand trust, and the natural world
Rebecca Renner is an award-winning author, National Geographic contributor, investigative journalist, and experienced keynote speaker whose work has reached millions of readers.
Her acclaimed nonfiction book Gator Country was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and People Magazine Book of the Week, received a Florida Book Award, and was selected to represent Florida at the Library of Congress National Book Festival. She is also a grantee of the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
Onstage, Rebecca brings together rigorous research, narrative craft, humor, and intellectual synthesis that allows an audience to see a familiar subject differently. Her keynotes explore how stories shape what we notice, what we create, whom we trust, and what we believe is possible.
Contact Andrew Wetzel at Lyceum Agency for booking.
Featured Topics
Storytelling and the Natural World
How narrative shapes conservation, conflict, and what we choose to protect
Stories are the battleground for the future of our planet.
Environmental conflicts are fought through competing narratives. Most people will never read an environmental impact statement, inspect a watershed, or study climate data: they encounter these fights through a media frame. The account that wins public trust can decimate an ecosystem or save it. At the planetary scale, the contest over narrative decides whether we will have a habitable planet in the future—or not.
AUDIENCE TAKEAWAYS
- How environmental disputes become stories the public can understand, support, or reject
- How political, commercial, and cultural interests compete to define what nature is worth and what its loss will cost
- How to tell environmental stories that can withstand competing narratives without sacrificing scientific or human complexity
BEST FOR
Conservation · Sustainability · Environmental Policy · Climate & Science Communication · Journalism · Higher Education · Ideas Festivals
Storytelling and Marketing
Why journalists ignore your pitches—and what makes them pay attention
Companies want coverage. Journalists need stories. Most bad media outreach begins by confusing those two things.
A journalist is not deciding whether your company deserves attention. They are deciding whether you have given them something worth reporting. That requires more than a relevant beat, a personalized greeting, or another follow-up email. It requires editorial judgment: knowing where the actual story is, why an audience should care, and what you can offer that makes the reporting stronger.
AUDIENCE TAKEAWAYS
- How journalists decide whether a pitch contains a story
- How to distinguish news value from information that matters mainly to the organization sending it
- What makes data, expertise, access, sources, and angles genuinely useful to reporters
- How to replace high-volume outreach with stronger editorial judgment
BEST FOR
Public Relations · Corporate Communications · Marketing · Agencies · Media Relations · Professional Associations
FOR JOURNALISM AUDIENCES
This talk can also be presented from the other side of the exchange, with a focus on developing original story ideas, identifying an assignable angle, and pitching editors effectively.
Storytelling and Creativity
The Ideas That Don’t Exist Yet: How synthesis turns knowledge into invention
Breakthrough ideas rarely come from nowhere. They emerge when knowledge from one domain collides with a problem from another.
Synthesis is the cognitive move that turns what is already known into something that has no precedent. The harder skill is recognizing which connection merely surprises and which one creates a new possibility before the market knows to ask for it.
AUDIENCE TAKEAWAYS
- How to deliberately combine knowledge from distant domains instead of waiting for inspiration
- How to use analogy to import solutions from one field into problems in another
- How to tell when an unusual connection reveals a real opportunity rather than a clever coincidence
- Why breakthrough ideas often look premature before the surrounding technology, market, or culture is ready for them
BEST FOR
Technology · AI · R&D · Product & Engineering Leadership · Deep Tech · Venture Capital · Biotech · Research Institutions
Storytelling and Brand Trust
How every marketing decision builds or spends trust
A campaign can hit its target and still damage the brand.
The customer who wonders, "How did they get my email?" has learned something about the company before reading a word of the message. The same is true of fake scarcity, relentless retargeting, hidden subscriptions, hostile cancellation processes, and every other tactic that treats the immediate conversion as the only result worth measuring. Marketing does not end when someone clicks. Every interaction leaves behind an opinion, but not always a good one.
AUDIENCE TAKEAWAYS
- How to evaluate marketing decisions for both immediate performance and their effect on brand trust
- How consent, relevance, transparency, and friction alter the customer’s perception of a brand
- How to recognize short-term performance gains that are borrowing against future brand value
- How to pursue conversion without making the audience resent the company that achieved it
BEST FOR
Brand Strategy · Marketing Leadership · Customer Experience · Communications · Agencies · Founders & Executives
Orlando Speaker for Conferences, Corporate Events, and Conventions
Rebecca is an Orlando speaker available for conferences, conventions, trade shows, corporate meetings, association events, universities, and private programs throughout Central Florida.
Based in Orlando, she offers event planners the convenience of a local professional speaker with national credentials and experience speaking to high-level audiences. Her talks cover storytelling, innovation and creativity, media, brand trust, and the natural world.
Rebecca is also available for speaking engagements throughout the United States and internationally.