FULL BIO
Confronting power. Building movements.
Jo Lorenz is a writer, creative and organizer focused on class, climate, gender, and racial justice — wielding well-timed profanity against exceptionalism, dominance and binary thinking.
With 25+ years of experience spanning three continents, her career began in professional communications, followed by creative direction and editorial work with publications like Vogue and Tatler. Frustrated by the industry’s reluctance to address its climate and humanitarian impact, she launched her own consulting firm in 2014 — providing creative direction, consultation, and working with groups on sustainable and ethical practice. This work sat at the intersection of climate, racial, and gender inequity — exposing how supply chain exploitation disproportionately harms Black and Brown women globally, and how the Global North’s addiction to consumerism adversely affects all humans, all species, our environment, and the climate.
Jo has spent the last decade weaving together climate writing, ethical consumerism advocacy, antiracism work, and direct political organizing. In 2016, she co-founded digital media platform The Progressivists, now speaking directly to more than a million followers who refuse to accept the status quo. A Climate Reality Leader trained by Al Gore, she’s worked with numerous U.S. Congress members and senators on how to authentically connect with communities and move beyond transactional politics, while turning down those who didn’t grasp the fundamentals of community and collectivism. Her collaborations have extended to organizations and movements fighting for systemic change, always centering the principle that how we organize directly impacts people, communities, and our planet.
Jo has always believed the political wheel, on its own, is not enough — and remains unwavering in her conviction that institutional objectives only matter when they center collective liberation, and only when they're answerable to the movements doing the real work outside the wheel.
In 2025, Jo founded FictionToAction, a community that uses storytelling as the entry point for organizing — with toolkits to turn fiction into local, sustainable action. Through relational organizing, FictionToAction transforms everyday spaces like book clubs, watch parties, and living rooms into practical training grounds for community organizing, meeting people where they are and helping them find authentic ways to contribute to transformative change.
She’s also working on a few books. Publication TBD, sanity questionable.
As seen in . . .
