Evan Blaise Walsh is a strategist, storyteller, and facilitator working at the intersection of healing, imagination, and embodiment. Based in Philadelphia, his practice spans cultural strategy, fellowship design, coaching, facilitation, and creative production—with a focus on guiding people and organizations move through the journey of transformation with co-creation, care, and accompaniment.

Over the past decade, Evan has led ambitious social impact initiatives with artists, organizers, and institutions across the fields of narrative change, arts and culture, philanthropy, and social justice. He supported the founding of the artist collective For Freedoms from 2017–2020 and convened the community of social entrepreneurs at the Guild of Future Architects from 2020–2022. He has led numerous production, strategy, and social impact initiatives for Aperture, Sundance Film Festival / New Frontier, Cinereach, Pop Culture Collaborative, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, MOCA LA, The ICP Museum, Guardian US, Doris Duke Foundation, Bennett College, Light Work, Photoville, The Currier Museum, and many more.

Evan is currently the Director of Systems and Practice at Dot Connector Studio, where he leads client and collaborative work focused on radical imagination, strategic visioning, and restoration. He also serves as the Lead Facilitator and Producer of the Counter Histories Fellowship at Magnum Foundation, where he supports artists who elevate suppressed histories, reframe dominant narratives, and challenge the power structures embedded in archives.

Throughout his career, Evan has been an advocate for emerging creatives, especially those facing systemic barriers. He is guided by his creative community, spiritual practice, and a yearning to be in service to truth, renewal, transformation, justice, and healing for all beings.

 

To move forward, I had to let go of everything I thought I knew. I had to welcome—and grieve—the death of all ideas, beliefs, and notions of myself and the world. It could only be through total surrender to the swirling darkness that I could gain the strength to embody the deepest aspirations of my life and heart.

THE JOURNEY

I found my way to creativity as a queer teenager in an all-boys prep school in Pennsylvania, quietly decoding the anger, despair, and contradictions around me. This was the time of Obama’s first presidency, in one of the most 50/50 politically split counties in America, where growing up I’d learned that what people said to you on the surface was not necessarily what they believed. In this environment, my adolescence felt forever on the edge of a boiling point. Photography and writing became my survival tools. Artistic expression helped me interrogate what wasn’t being named, to trace the truth beneath performance, and to begin shaping a self in the gaps between dominant stories. I became a sort of spy, questioning the very fabric of my environment: I learned to ask not just what we believe, but why, and who gets to decide.

As I came of age, I found language for what I had already sensed: that systems of power don’t just shape the world around us—they shape the inner architecture of our bodies, relationships, and beliefs. Studying resistance movements and intersectionality deepened my commitment to dismantle the internalized narratives that keep us stuck, and to imagine new ones in their place. Over time, this instinct has pushed my practice to evolve through many forms: from community building to creative production, narrative stewardship to visionary strategy, from burnout to embodiment, from culture-making to systems design.

My interest in healing through story has brought me through deeply powerful thresholds: I’ve lead a nationwide campaign of thousands of simultaneous art activations and helped social entrepreneurs launch new companies for the social good. I’ve spearheaded research initiatives and futurist strategy sprints that informed mobilization of philanthropic resources and pulled at the levers of policy and power to resource movements for justice. I’ve produced biopics and magazines and books and exhibitions and global art fellowships. I’ve captained a gay football team and I’ve facilitated writers’ groups and men’s circles and Buddhist retreats. Along the way, I’ve found deep connection with everyone on the journey. Each beloved community has guided my path from awakening, to narrative, to imagination, to embodiment. Each season of my life taught me something about what it means to transform our society and ourselves with care, clarity, and courage.