Give people something they'll still be talking about on the flight home.
I'm Mary Williams, a media strategist, studio founder, longtime creator, and former Disney Animation Digital Archivist, and I speak about creativity, visibility, media, technology, and the increasingly valuable role humans play when machines can make more stuff than any of us could possibly consume.
My work tends to live in the places where seemingly unrelated things collide because, after a career that has included information science, entertainment, entrepreneurship, tarot, technology, and more than fifteen years of making things on the internet, I've learned that the interesting idea is usually hiding somewhere between the categories.
I like finding it... and then handing it to a room full of people so we can pull it apart together.
I speak about the question underneath the question.
I've spent most of my career translating between worlds that don't always know how to talk to each other: artists and technologists, humans and systems, data and intuition, creators and the platforms they're trying to survive on.
I hold a Master of Science in Information from the University of Michigan, and I began my career working with digital media and technology at Disney before eventually becoming a Digital Archivist at Disney Animation. I've been creating online since 2010, spent years consulting on technology and business systems, and now run Sasquatch Media Grounds, a media studio in Vancouver, Washington.
That combination means I'm usually less interested in giving an audience ten more things to add to their to-do list than I am in showing them the thing they've been looking at from the wrong direction. Once you can see the pattern, you can make a much better decision about what to do next.
Current speaking topics
Don't Be Boring
Being forgettable is expensive.
The internet has never had more content, and increasingly, an awful lot of it looks and sounds exactly the same. AI didn't create that problem... it just made it painfully obvious.
Don't Be Boring explores why specificity, taste, lived experience, curiosity, and a willingness to make actual creative choices become more valuable as content itself gets cheaper and easier to produce. Instead of trying to compete with machines on volume, creators and organizations have an opportunity to invest in the thing machines need from us in the first place: original human source material worth amplifying.
Audiences leave thinking differently about what actually makes an idea memorable, why “professional” so often becomes indistinguishable from “generic,” and how to make creative choices that give people something worth remembering.
Best for: creator economy, entrepreneurship, marketing, media, leadership, and innovation audiences.
Do You Actually Want to Be Famous?
Visibility is a tool. Fame is an outcome... and those are not the same thing.
After working in entertainment, spending more than fifteen years online, and building media with founders and creators, I've watched an enormous number of people chase visibility without ever stopping to ask what they want that visibility to accomplish.
More followers, more customers, industry authority, better opportunities, a recognizable body of work, access to particular rooms, and actual fame are completely different objectives, but we've somehow collapsed all of them into “you need to grow your audience.”
This talk pulls those ideas back apart. Instead of assuming maximum exposure is automatically the goal, I help audiences ask a much more useful question: What do you actually want to be known for... and by whom?
Best for: founders, creators, executives, personal brands, professional associations, and anyone who has been informed by the internet that they apparently need to “be more visible.”
Creator Chemistry
The most interesting work often happens where things that aren't supposed to belong together collide.
Business loves telling people to pick a lane, but creativity has never been particularly interested in staying inside one.
Drawing from information science, entertainment, media production, entrepreneurship, and twenty years of working with intuition, Creator Chemistry explores what happens when we stop stripping the supposedly unrelated parts out of our work and start paying attention to the combinations of experience, expertise, identity, obsession, and curiosity that make our ideas unmistakably ours.
Differentiation isn't always something you need to manufacture. Sometimes it's already there... hiding inside the parts of yourself you were told weren't relevant.
Best for: entrepreneurs, creative professionals, retreats, women's leadership events, and creator communities.
About Mary
Mary Williams is a media strategist, speaker, and founder of Sasquatch Media Grounds, a boutique media studio in Vancouver, Washington. She began her career in digital media and technology, including several years at Disney and work as a Digital Archivist at Disney Animation, and holds a Master of Science in Information from the University of Michigan.
A creator since 2010, Mary now works at the intersection of media strategy, human creativity, technology, and the creator economy. Her work examines how original human source material becomes more valuable, not less, as technology makes content increasingly easy to produce... and how creators and organizations can build visibility that actually does something instead of simply generating more noise.
She's known for translating complicated ideas into frameworks people can actually use, preferably while making them laugh.
Bring Mary to your stage.
I speak at conferences, retreats, company events, creator gatherings, professional associations, workshops, and the occasional room that hasn't quite figured out what category I belong in yet (those tend to be especially fun).
For speaking inquiries, tell me your event date and location, who will be in the room, approximately how many people you're expecting, and most importantly... what do you want them to walk away thinking about differently?
Need someone to hold the room?
Keynotes aren't the only thing I do with a microphone.
I've hosted podcasts, interviewed founders and experts, facilitated conversations, and emceed live events, which means I'm comfortable following a run of show without becoming helpless the second something interesting happens that wasn't in it.
If you need an emcee, moderator, interviewer, or live conversation facilitator who can listen closely, find the thread, ask a better follow-up question, and keep a room moving (including recognizing when everyone desperately needs a bathroom break), we should probably talk.
Selected speaking
I've been speaking to audiences for more than a decade, in rooms ranging from professional conferences and business events to creator gatherings and a tarot symposium (because apparently my career has never respected category labels either).
2026 · SXSW Podcast Movement Evolutions
Why Bold Creative Wins
A session about creative risk, differentiation, and making media people actually remember.
2026 · The Grow Retreat
Creator Chemistry
A keynote exploring how the unexpected combinations of our experience, expertise, identity, and curiosity become the raw material for distinctive creative work.
Video coming soon…
2025 · New Money, New Economy
Panel + Workshop
A marketing & connection event for queer founders in metro Portland to increase cash flow, valuation, and create funding opportunities.
2024 - 2025 · SparkPDX / Freelancers Union
Multiple panels + Solo Talk: Close Sales Faster With This Conversation Path
2024 · Reinvented, The Reinvention Co.
Event emcee and featured participant, keeping the program moving while helping create the kind of live conversation that doesn't feel like somebody is simply waiting for the next slide.
2020 · Northwest Tarot Symposium · Portland, Oregon
Ask Better Questions, Get Better Answers
A workshop built from my combined experience as a librarian and professional tarot reader, teaching participants how to dissect where a question actually comes from so they can identify what they're really asking and get more useful answers.
2013 · Special Libraries Association Annual Conference · San Diego, California
Dream Jobs: What's It Like to Work THERE?
A conference session from an earlier chapter of my career, when I was working in digital asset management at Guthy-Renker after several years at Disney Animation. It also happens to be a useful receipt that I've been getting on stages to talk about unusual careers and complicated ideas for a very long time.
