Colleen Black
Public Speaker
Colleen transforms her extraordinary lived experience and hard-earned wisdom into powerful stories, keynotes and conversations across stages and media.
Available for in-person and virtual speaking engagements in New England, across the U.S. and worldwide.
grew up with a life-threatening illness and faced her own mortality at a young age
received a breakthrough treatment as a young adult that gave her a second chance at life
restarted life in her 30s, found her voice and now crafts meaningful stories and messages
a Boston-Based Storyteller and Speaker, who:
Recent Engagements
View
Sample Talks
Stories from the head and the heart.
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Storyteller
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Keynote Speaker
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Writer
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Storyteller • Keynote Speaker • Writer •
ABOUT Colleen
Colleen Black is a Boston-based storyteller, keynote speaker and writer.
Born with Cystic Fibrosis, a progressive genetic disease that once carried a limited life expectancy, Colleen spent much of her life preparing for a future she wasn’t expected to have. While navigating relentless medical treatments, the loss of peers to the same disease, family trauma, and her own mental health struggles, Colleen defiantly refused to give up.
By her mid-twenties, her health deteriorated so severely that she faced her own mortality head-on. In 2019, a breakthrough medication radically transformed Colleen’s prognosis, giving her a second chance at life.
Today, Colleen uses storytelling and keynotes to transform her lived experience into moving talks with relatable themes.
Colleen brings raw authenticity, emotional depth, and lasting wisdom to corporate conferences, events and media platforms across the U.S. Her talks empower audiences to navigate life’s challenges with courage, perspective and possibility.
WORK
WITH Colleen
Whether you're planning a conference, corporate event, fundraiser, leadership summit, podcast or media interview, Colleen will collaborate with you to create a customized storytelling experience tailored to your goals and audience.
Memorable. Relatable. Aligned.
keynotes & Topics
Explore signature keynotes, foundational topics and custom talks. Existing keynotes can be tailored or new talks can be developed from the ground up.
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1. Owning Your Story (As Your Strength)
An empowering keynote on identity, shame and the transformative power of fully owning your story.
Drawing from a lifetime of navigating a rare chronic illness and never fitting neatly into “healthy” or “sick” worlds, Colleen explores what happens when we stop hiding the parts of ourselves we’ve been taught to feel ashamed of. This talk reveals how embracing your full story, both the struggle and the strength, can unlock purpose, belonging and authentic connection.
2. Flicker: Keeping Hope & Resilience Alive During Uncertainty & Adversity
A deeply human keynote on emotional endurance, hope and what it takes to keep going in the face of profound uncertainty.
This talk explores what it means to live through daily survival, burnout and fear while still defiantly choosing to build a meaningful life. Audiences will discover how even in the darkest seasons, a small flicker of hope can become the light that guides us forward.
3. The Myth of Falling Behind: Late Blooming, Reinvention and Reclaiming Time
A reflective keynote on time, identity and what it means to rebuild a life when you feel “behind.”
This talk navigates how our relationship with time shapes our choices, shame and sense of possibility. Through a powerful reframing of late blooming, Colleen challenges the myth that life must unfold on a fixed timeline and invites audiences to see detours not as delays, but as redirections.
4. Beyond the Box: Breaking Labels and Expanding Possibility
A keynote on the cost of labels, stigmas and stereotypes—and how they quietly shape what we believe is possible.
What happens when the labels placed on us become the limits we live by? Colleen examines the hidden cost of being defined by diagnoses, stereotypes and social narratives, and challenges audiences to break free from the boxes to reclaim freedom, complexity and possibility.
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1. Owning Your Story as a Leader
Identity, authenticity and the power of lived experience in leadership and workplace culture
A leadership-focused keynote on how personal story and lived experience can become one of the most powerful assets in the workplace. Drawing from a lifetime of navigating difference, adversity and identity complexity, Colleen explores how leaders often underutilize their own lived experience, and the experiences of their teams, by defaulting to professional masks. This talk reframes authenticity not as oversharing, but as strategic leadership: a tool for trust, connection, innovation and stronger organizational culture.
Key Learning Objectives:
Leverage lived experience as a leadership strength: Understand how personal history, adversity and difference can enhance leadership presence, empathy and decision-making.
Build trust through authentic leadership: Explore how appropriate vulnerability and story-sharing strengthen psychological safety, engagement and team cohesion.
Move from performance to presence: Learn how leaders can step out of “role-based identity” and lead with more clarity, humanity and impact.
2. Leading Through Uncertainty, Failure and High-Stakes Innovation
Resilience, endurance and sustaining belief in work that defies the odds.
A leadership keynote for biotech, healthcare and innovation-driven industries on what it takes to sustain hope, performance and belief in environments defined by uncertainty, failure, and long timelines. Drawing parallels from a life lived in chronic medical uncertainty, Colleen explores how teams working on cures, treatments and breakthrough technologies must continually operate without guarantees of success. This talk reframes resilience not as positivity, but as disciplined endurance—the ability to keep moving forward when outcomes are unknown but the mission is essential.
Key Learning Objectives:
Reframe resilience for high-uncertainty industries: Understand resilience as a leadership practice for navigating failure, ambiguity and long development cycles.
Sustain belief in long-horizon missions: Explore how teams in biotech and tech maintain motivation and purpose when outcomes are uncertain or years away.
Normalize iteration, failure and restart cycles: Learn how to lead teams through repeated setbacks without losing momentum, morale or meaning.
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Survival Mode, Burnout & Learning to Truly Live
Time, Mortality & Living With Perspective
Being a Late Bloomer, Feeling Behind & Reclaiming Lost Time
Reinvention & Starting Over
Navigating Major Life Transitions
Hope & Resilience During Uncertainty and Hardship
Human Potential & What's Possible When We Refuse to Give Up
Identity, Belonging & Embracing What Makes You Different
Owning Your Story & Finding Your Voice
Making It All Count: Purpose, Meaning & Impact
Overcoming Adversity, Trauma & Shame
Mental Health & Emotional Well-Being
Creativity, Storytelling & Self-Expression
Community, Collaboration & Collective Action
Chronic Illness, Disability & Invisible Challenges
Cystic Fibrosis, Type 1 Diabetes & Building a Life Alongside Chronic Illness
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Baggage: A moving exploration of the visible and invisible baggage we all carry, and a reminder we don’t have to lift it on our own.
The Greatest Group Project of Our Lifetime : A talk on the power of collective action, and the countless people whose shared efforts transformed a once-terminal diagnosis into a future filled with possibility.
Daring to Dream: A heartfelt story about how one Make-A-Wish experience became a lifelong source of hope, resilience and possibility in the face of a life-threatening illness.
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meaningful
“Colleen does more than share her story; she pulls meaning and depth from her experiences and relays difficult topics with empathy, humor and grace. She commits hours of planning and preparation ahead of time, starting with understanding her audience and crafting a strong message with feeling and candid vulnerability.”
– KATHERINE R.
Founder, Spit It Out -
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genuine
“Colleen creates an atmosphere that is full of emotion and empathy. She is genuine, articulate and thoughtful of her surroundings. You’ll be so invested in listening to her speak, that before you know it, minutes will have turned into an hour. Her talks will leave you with an entirely new perspective on life, an experience you can only hope to have again someday.”
– TREVOR H.
Manager , Rock CF Foundation -
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compelling
“Colleen’s voice was compelling; her delivery was articulate, measured, and deeply sincere. She managed to convey the gravity of her experience with both clarity and emotional resonance, drawing the audience in and honoring the seriousness of the issue.”
– SHIRAH B.
Founder, NightCap -
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POWERFUL
“Colleen's incredible story of strength, perseverance and lasting impact is so powerful, and sharing it helped us reach our fundraising goal for the event. We can't thank her enough!”
– MONICA J.
Senior Manager, Make-A-Wish
What Makes Colleen
different
Masterfully crafted stories: As a professionally trained writer, Colleen brings her expertise in narrative structure and language to create clear, artfully crafted stories that land.
Head & heart delivery: Her talks are a unique blend of vivid storytelling, vulnerability and practical takeaways. She nails the balance between raw emotion and clear, hard-hitting insights.
A rare perspective: Colleen speaks from firsthand experience, offering audiences a one-of-a-kind perspective.
Audience-first storytelling: While she incorporates lived experience, her talks center on universal pain points and messages that audiences can connect to.