Julie Trell

Julie Trell is the founder and Chief Play Officer of Playful Purpose, a Sydney-based business that uses play, improv, design thinking and curiosity to help teams build creativity and workplace skills. Her path there spans education and technology, beginning as a classroom teacher in inner-city Atlanta and later a middle-school technology specialist. She went on to become a founding member of the Salesforce Foundation, where she held the title VP of All Things Fun, Meaningful and Rewarding, and served as the first Executive Director of the Workday Foundation. In early 2017 she relocated from San Francisco to Sydney to lead Telstra's startup accelerator muru-D, which worked with a portfolio of more than 140 startups across Australia and Singapore. She also helped launch SheEO, now Coralus, serving as an Australia lead and Super Activator for the organisation.

Julie describes herself as a fractional Chief Play Officer, workshop designer, speaker and peer coach. Her current work focuses on fusing applied improv with artificial intelligence, and she sees play as a way to build the human skills that make people irreplaceable in an AI world.