BROOKE HALL

CEO | Author | Speaker

Brooke Hall is a cultural innovator, speaker, and founder whose work brings bold ideas to life and reimagines what becomes possible when creativity, community, and technology meet. For more than two decades, she has created experiences and movements that inspire imagination, spark collaboration, and expand the boundaries of what’s possible.

As founder and CEO of What Works Studio, Brooke leads one of the few woman-led creative agencies working at the intersection of storytelling, strategy, and emerging technology. Under her leadership, the studio has delivered campaigns and initiatives that have shaped culture on a global scale—from the viral success of Mr. Trash Wheel, named Discovery Channel’s #1 Story of the Year and featured in National Geographic and The New Yorker, to guiding Kaiser Permanente’s social media during the COVID-19 pandemic, to helping the Enoch Pratt Free Library achieve record attendance and national recognition. She also directed Baltimore’s historic #GivingTuesday campaign, which raised $5.9 million in a single day, earned the city the title of “Most Generous City in America,” and is now part of a permanent Smithsonian exhibition.

Brooke’s larger cultural projects have drawn hundreds of thousands of people and generated more than $100 million in economic impact. She co-founded What Weekly, an arts and innovation magazine that highlighted what was working in Baltimore and cultivated a new spirit of possibility through open editorial gatherings, a social club, underground art parties, and cultural events.

With her partner, she went on to dream up and launch Light City, America’s first international light and music festival. In its first year alone, the festival drew more than 400,000 attendees and delivered a $33.8 million economic impact for Maryland. Over its first three years, Light City attracted more than 1.3 million attendees and generated $111.6 million in economic impact, establishing it as one of the most impactful recurring festivals in Baltimore’s history. Alongside the festival, she produced Light City U, a social innovation conference that sold out in its inaugural year.

Her work has been featured by CNN, The Guardian, New York Magazine, Fast Company, and National Geographic, and recognized with honors including Innovator of the Year, Top Female CEO, 25 Women to Watch, and the Silo Breaker Award. She was also selected for Salzburg Global’s Young Cultural Innovator Fellowship, an international program recognizing rising leaders making transformative cultural impact around the world. She studied philosophy and literature at Florida Atlantic University’s Wilkes Honors College, a foundation that continues to shape her work on perspective, creativity, and human potential. She is also a certified meditation teacher trained by Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach, a practitioner of Biofield Tuning, and a graduate of Yale’s Science of Well-Being course.

Based in Southern California, Brooke’s work guides others to shift from resistance to flow, helping them awaken their natural peace, joy, and creative potential.

Her upcoming book, The Pronoia Effect (Spring 2026), explores how awareness and trust in life can reshape perception and reveal the peace and potential already within us.

Whether leading brands, building cultural movements, or speaking on the power of perspective and creativity, Brooke continues to illuminate what can happen when we choose to see the world through possibility and act with heart and imagination.