The host
An artist running a room of strategists.
Tracey Halvorsen is CEO & President of Digital at adeo, a Baltimore-based creative agency serving higher education, cultural institutions, nonprofits, and complex growth brands. Before adeo she co-founded Fastspot, serving as Chief Visionary Officer for two decades. She is also a contemporary painter with multiple solo exhibitions, whose work is collected throughout the U.S.
When the stakes are high, the politics are complex, and the end result has to be extraordinary, you want someone in the room who thinks like an artist and can still run the meeting.
Host · Painter · Baltimore
Why this podcast
Tracey started the show because conversation is one of the most creative and collaborative things we get to do. Not a vehicle for delivering ideas that already exist, but the place where new ones actually show up, in the exchange itself, usually somewhere neither person planned to go.
So there is no agenda and no framework. No questions sent in advance, no format to hit. Every guest is someone she is genuinely curious about, and the invitation is essentially the one she wishes more people got: come talk about the thing you have actually been thinking about.
What that produces, across dozens of conversations, is a running search for the combination of velocity, experience, bravery and honesty that lets people do their most ambitious work. In astrophysics, escape velocity is the speed an object must reach to break free of a planet's gravitational pull. Every creative project has the same threshold, and reaching it usually starts with saying the true thing out loud to somebody else.
A selected CV
- CEO & President of Digital, adeo: guiding higher ed, cultural and mission-driven orgs through brand and web transformation.
- Co-founder & CVO, Fastspot: led the Baltimore agency for two decades.
- Contemporary painter: multiple solo exhibitions, with work collected throughout the U.S.
- Speaker: closing session of the 47th UCDA Design Conference (Designers (Should) Run the World), plus talks at the Wharton Web Conference, Confab London, SEER Interactive's Search Church in Philadelphia, and SXSW.
- NASA Goddard Space Flight Center: invited in to coach the content and marketing team on storytelling, after publishing a piece that used NASA's own site as a case study in how much better it could be.
- Memoire: pioneering interactive storytelling, premiered at Flash Forward NYC and winner of the Flash Film Festival award in Amsterdam.
