FULL BIO
Confronting power. Building movements.
Jo Lorenz is a writer, creative, and organizer building toward collective liberation — wielding well-timed profanity against exceptionalism, binary thinking, and hegemony in all its forms.
With 25+ years of experience spanning three continents, her career includes 15 years 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 clients on sustainability while helping pioneer ethical consumerism work in Hong Kong. This work sat at the intersection of climate, racial, and gender inequity — exposing how supply chain exploitation disproportionately harms Black and Brown women globally.
Over the last decade, her work has woven together climate writing, conscious consumerism advocacy, antiracism work, and direct political organizing. In 2016, Jo co-founded digital media platform The Progressivists, now speaking directly to more than a million followers who refuse to accept the status quo.
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.
Jo is currently developing a relational organizing framework — working with beta testers, with plans to launch in early 2026 — that 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. 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.
She is also Communications Director for Climate Defiance, a direct action climate organization that confronts the politicians and CEOs destroying our planet. A Climate Reality Leader trained by Al Gore in 2019, Jo remains unwavering in her conviction that institutional objectives only matter when they center collective liberation — a standard almost never met by today’s establishments.
She’s also working on a few books. Publication TBD, sanity questionable.
As seen in . . .
