Kathryn L Morrissey

Visiting Artistic & Research Fellow

Kathryn is a creator and connector at heart — a builder and convener committed to strengthening the cultural infrastructure our moment demands, ensuring that human expression, connection, creativity, and agency remain central to our relationships and to how we show up in our communities, schools, and workplaces in an era of unprecedented technological transformation.

Over the past two decades, she has worked at the intersection of mental health, disability advocacy, youth development, education, and public policy. Her understanding of how and why public systems fracture, particularly for underserved and marginalized communities began forming early in life. Raised in proximity to state and federal disability and mental health policy through her father’s role as a Massachusetts state-appointed Commissioner of Developmental Disability Services, she spent her formative years in legislative forums and in rooms with parent groups, policymakers, and funders, witnessing both the siloing within institutions and the possibilities to reimagine how systems might care for the whole human. Navigating her own mental health journey alongside overlapping learning disabilities further deepened her insight into how traditional education and care systems are structured and where they fail to support diverse ways of learning, developing, and belonging.

Kathryn attended the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, studying marketing and communications while beginning her nonprofit career at seventeen. She has held senior leadership positions across strategy, cross-sector partnership development, and program design with organizations at the regional, national, and global levels, including the Child Mind Institute, Best Buddies International, Special Olympics Northern California, AIM Youth Mental Health, and the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship.

More recently, she has advised initiatives across the responsible technology field, advancing efforts to elevate human connection and agency and to amplify non-digital interventions and solutions for children and teens within public dialogue, awareness, and education alongside policy efforts addressing social media and ed tech governance, AI harms, and technology ethics.

As well as a Visiting Artistic & Research Fellow with humanities for… Kathryn is a Fellow of the Global Philanthropy Forum and a Trustee of the UK-based charity House of Imagination.