Connect authentically.
REAL™ Series
Dee’s signature series of talks and workshops on real connection, real leadership, and real life. Through live, facilitated experiences, audiences move from going through the motions to genuine trust — and leave thinking differently about what motivates them and where they want to grow. Ideal for leadership retreats, offsites, and women’s networks.
AI vs Human
A live, hands-on keynote on AI and bias. Audiences prompt AI in real time and watch bias surface in front of them — then leave knowing how to prompt smarter and where human judgment still has to win. Ideal for corporate teams, conferences, and professional societies.
Custom Keynotes
Have a specific room, theme, or moment? Dee tailors a keynote to your audience and goals — drawing on her work across connection, leadership, brand, and lived authenticity. Tell her what your people need to walk away with, and she’ll build it.
Dee Heffernan is a keynote speaker, TEDx alum, and truth-teller who helps organizations see clearly in a world engineered to blur our vision.
A brand executive and founder who studied Human Development at the University of Chicago, Dee brings strategic clarity and lived experience to every room she enters. Her flagship keynote on AI and bias is a live, hands-on experience: audiences prompt AI in real time and watch bias surface in front of them, then leave knowing how to think sharper about what the technology can do — and where human judgment still has to win.
She also leads “REAL™ Connection,” a facilitated experience that moves a room from going through the motions to genuine trust, and her TEDx talk explores the pressure to achieve and the cost of perfection. Whether the subject is technology, self, or each other, Dee’s through-line is the same: stop performing, start seeing what’s real, and live from that place.
Dee speaks from her lived experience at the intersections of LGBTQ identity, 20 yrs of marriage to a woman, raising three daughters; a former collegiate athlete; the daughter of immigrants and entrepreneurs.
She has appeared on the TEDx Arlington Heights stage and delivered her AI keynote to audiences including a 100-person medical society.
And yes, she has chickens and chainsaws her own trees.
