Official Bios
Shannon Mullen O’Keefe, chief curator of The Museum of Ideas and co-author of 10 Moral Questions: how to design tech and AI responsibly.
SHORT
Shannon Mullen O’Keefe is a lover of wisdom dedicated to imagining what we can build and achieve together. She is a strategic advisor, thinker, writer, facilitator, co-author of 10 Moral Questions: how to design tech and AI responsibly., and chief curator of The Museum of Ideas. As a leader of global teams, Mullen O’Keefe has spent over 20 years guiding teams through culture change conversations and initiatives. She lives in the US midwest.
LONG
Shannon Mullen O’Keefe is building The Museum of Ideas to help us protect a place for deeper thinking. She believes in the power of imagination to help us create collective meaning in modern life. She sees a world where ideas are embraced as art forms, where people think freely, ask questions with confidence, and seek together to shape our better future through collaborative imagination and curious exploration. Her vision derives from our responsibility as a species to capture what is best about us and to live our best human lives. She is a strategic advisor, thinker, writer, facilitator, co-author of 10 Moral Questions: how to design tech and AI responsibly., and chief curator of The Museum of Ideas. Mullen O’Keefe has spent over 20 years guiding teams through culture change conversations and initiatives. Trained in the field of diplomacy, Mullen O’Keefe has worked in leading teams and initiatives for global professional services organizations, and a nature-based non-profit organization. She’s also co-curated an artistic exhibition and installation for a global audience in Sintra, Portugal, and has facilitated conversations about AI and technology ethics.
O’Keefe’s 10 Moral Questions: how to design tech and AI Responsibly co-authored with QCollective, was listed on The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy’s 2024 Mixed-Media list. She has spoken on AI and regularly contributes her thinking on The Museum of Ideas Substack publication. Mullen O’Keefe’s work has been featured in House of Beautiful Business. She lives in the US midwest.
Ps. She designs florals as a part-time, contemplative pursuit, crafting arrangements inspired by the nuances of nature and the fleeting beauty of real cut flowers.
“The imagination has no limits.
The physical world does.
The work exists in both.”
― Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being
Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan
About My Current Work:
I make slow, deliberate things for an accelerating world. As technology takes on more of the work of humans, I’m drawn to the capacities that remain ours to cultivate: thought, reflection, attention, intimacy, conscience, and the habit of noticing.
Currently my work takes five forms. I continue to grow and build The Museum of Ideas. I’m authoring a thinkers’ journal for The Museum of Ideas, planning activations for ‘27 and I’ve co-founded and serve as art director of a new magazine for leading minds nurturing our human capacities in order to grow what machines can’t. Alongside these, I’m collaborating to breathe life into a journal for friends that will revive analog intimacy, and I’m co-authoring with my QCollective team colleagues, an AI journal that invites moral reflection on the technology we now live with.
Beyond these, I collaborate with an artist on an ongoing online art installation that catalogs things slowly disappearing from sight.
Thinking, relating, judging, noticing, curating, tending. Each of these projects might be seen as a different room, you might say, in The Museum of Ideas, but in fact, not all of them are museum projects. Some are adjacent to that effort. Even so, they are things that I feel are worth investing in.
Learn more about The Museum and the rest below.
I hope our paths cross soon, whether through one of these projects or another,
—Shannon
As founder of The Museum of Ideas, I’ve created a place that exists to protect and honor human thought and human thinkers. We see a world where ideas are embraced as art forms, where people think freely, ask questions with confidence, and seek together to shape our better future through collaborative imagination and curious exploration. The vision derives from our responsibility as a species to capture what is best about us and to live our best human lives. We do this by exploring emerging thought and empowering (human) inventors and dreamers, creators, thinkers, entrepreneurs, and their ideas through our work, our publications, our projects and activations. I invite you to follow The Museum Substack publication here.
I coauthored a book (with four other citizen leaders) about moral questions for technology leaders published in January of 2024. Check it out at 10moralquestions.com.
Our next book currently in pre-production, planned release early ‘27.
I authored The (Death of a)Thing and in collaboration with another artist created The (Death of a) Thing: The Last Catalog. It is the independent art publication that acknowledges our relationship with objects, sometimes inanimate material objects, that we’ve become accustomed to living with, but that might be slowly flickering out of our sight. Conceived of as a growing place to register the everyday things of our lives that are dying, and to acknowledge our feelings about that, the first limited edition issue begins with sixteen dying things as curated by the artists. Each release thereafter describes a thing as if it were in a catalog for sale. Instead of offering a monetary value for the thing, though, The (Death of a) Thing turns our attention to the cost of its loss to us.
A new magazine co-founded with a partner for the human minds leading in the age of machines to be released in Q4 2026. Stay tuned!
I sparked the vision and concept and worked alongside three other leaders and changemakers to activate this global social experiment about collaboration and trust. The first phase of the project was completed in Berlin, September ‘25. Follow the ongoing project for new developments.
Our next journal currently in pre-production. Stay tuned for release dates.
My co-author and I put the QCollective Values framework into practice in a series of ethical tech articles. The QC Framework is built on the premise that technology only benefits humans and the overall planet when its creators imagine and build it in a responsible, holistic and futureproof way. We believe this is necessary and possible. We believe we owe it to each other to ask questions and to think through our inventions so that we can create things together that will better our lives.
I frequently contribute my reflections on the invisible things all around us that matter to our lives and leadership.
Find an archive of my collaborations with leaders, thinkers, and everyday experts. We’ve published thought pieces that invite thinking about our better future.
"Master, serene are
All hours
We waste, if in
The wasting them,
As in a jar,
We set flowers..." --FP
Photo: AI House, Davos Swizterland, January 2024