Robert X Fogarty

CEO and Founder, Dear World

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Robert X Fogarty- Keynote Speaking Reel

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Topics

Corporate Culture Speakers Innovation & Creativity Motivational Innovation Speakers Creativity Speakers

Robert X Fogarty

CEO and Founder, Dear World

Add To My Favorites Check Fee/Availability

In-Person Fee Range:

Call For Fee

Fee Details

Virtual Fee Range:

Inquire for Fee

Traveling from:

Lousiana

Why Book

Robert X. Fogarty does not deliver speeches. He designs transformational experiences. In every Dear World experience, audiences are not spoken at — they are engaged.
As the founder of Dear World, Robert pioneered the Brain Tattoo® Method — a live, participatory storytelling process that helps individuals connect their personal values to organizational mission in a single unforgettable sentence.
He has since expanded his methodology into additional interactive experiences, including the P(o)rtrait Process™ and Write Your Future™, deepening the impact from keynote inspiration to lasting cultural alignment.

Biography

Robert X. Fogarty is the founder of Dear World, a global storytelling movement rooted in meaning, values, and lived experience. He began photographing handwritten messages on people in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. What started as a small art project evolved into a global platform that has captured more than one million stories and he has personally photographed more than 100,000 people since he began.

Robert has worked with leaders at Google, PayPal, Delta Air Lines, Charles Schwab, UBS, Hyatt, the United States Air Force, and Duke University Basketball under Coach Mike Krzyzewski. His work has helped organizations build cultures of belonging, resilience, and courage by aligning meaningful stories with the organizations’ values.

He has taken a Boston Marathon bombing survivor back to the finish line for her portrait. He photographed a police officer who spent three hours inside the Pulse nightclub during the shooting. He has worked with refugees, executives, athletes, and frontline teams all through the same lens: every human has a story worth shaping and sharing.

Robert’s methodology blends storytelling, photography, psychology, and narrative into interactive keynote experiences for audiences of any size. His orginal format is the Brain Tattoo® — a single sentence written in black marker that captures who you are at your core.

He lives in Salt Lake City, Utah with his Wife Nubia and their forthcoming daughter (due July 2026) and continues to build Dear World as both a live experience and a leadership development platform.

Programs

The Brain Tattoo™ Experience

Audience members write a message on their skin in black ink that is the first line to a meaningful moment in their life. This experience strengthens trust, belonging, and psychological safety in real time and is customized to fit the theme or values of the organization.

The P(o)rtrait Process™

Audiuence members reflect on how they want to be seen and participants photograph each other. Fogarty demonstrates live on stage how a beautiful photo is about curiosity and not the camera. The experience culminates in participatns taking professional portraits of each other. Teams see one another differently, often for the first time.

Write your future.™

In this interactive keynote, Robert X. Fogarty explores the enduring power of letter writing, intentionality, and narrative identity. The experience features a pre-selected leader who reads a deeply personal letter on stage, followed by a podcast-style conversation that brings the story to life, revealing the doubts, decisions, and defining moments behind the words. A letter writing activation follows where participants write a letter to themselvs in the future and Dear World mails it back to them 1 year later.

Topics

Corporate Culture Speakers, Innovation & Creativity, Motivational, Innovation Speakers, Creativity Speakers,

Robert X Fogarty Reviews

Because of Dear World, we are better able to tell our story and invoke curiosity from others to learn more about who we are, where we came from and where we are going. Thanks for your innovative and meaningful work. Every Airman has a story — you made a huge difference in this Airman’s life.

— Ret. Deputy Chief of Staff Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance United States Air Force

“Dear World has everything to gives us an opportunity to share an intimate moment or moments with people we love and with people who we are trying develop an amazing amount of trust with. There can be no more trust than to tell someone something intimate about themselves. And when the whole team does that you have a chance to be a lot closer. Not only did we have a chance, we did become so much closer because we trusted one another. And it had nothing to do with basketball but it had everything to do with basketball. Because it created a more trusting environment where you could teach a better defense offense and really a better system of communication because people aren’t holding anything back.”

— National and Olympic Champion Basketball Coach Duke University, USA Basketball

“I’ve never seen an exercise break down barriers faster than this one. If you want a group to connect and bond quickly I would highly recommend Dear World.”

— CHRO, Hyatt Hotelsl