Maryam Mehrtash

Name: TEDxArlington Heights
Start: 2026-10-24
End: 2026-10-24
Location: TEDxArlington Heights

Book Maryam

The right story can change a room, a career, a company, even what people believe is possible.

Keynotes on the power of narrative, the courage to say what matters, and the stories only you can tell.

Help your people tell a story as strong as the work they do.

Most people already know how to work hard. What nobody's taught them is how to build a narrative around that work, one that lands in the room, travels without them, and moves the people who need to hear it. Whether they're pitching a client, selling a product, or making the case for their own next role, the story is what closes the deal, and Maryam spent twenty years shaping campaigns at the highest levels of the entertainment industry proving it.

The right story is strategy.

Following Maryam Mehrtash's work has been like taking a masterclass in courage and leadership.

Her immigrant past, followed by her rise to success, is profoundly inspiring. She is motivational, practical, and real, not to mention a world-class speaker.

Lory Warren

Executive Director,

The Prohuman Foundation

Keynote Topics

Keynotes on narrative, courage, and the human side of leadership from a twenty-year entertainment executive who built campaigns for some of the most recognizable brands and franchises in the world.

TOPIC 01

The Power of Narrative

Why story is the strategy for your career, your team, and your bottom line, and how to build one that lands in the room and travels without you.

Best for sales kickoffs, marketing and revenue teams, and leadership offsites.

TOPIC 02

Why the Best Stories Are Polarizing

The stories that try to appeal to everyone reach no one, so the real risk is playing it safe, not building a point of view strong enough to polarize.

Best for brand and marketing conferences and founder and creator summits.

TOPIC 03

Leading With Courage:

Why Your Smartest People Aren't Telling You the Truth

Leading With Courage: Why Your Smartest People Aren't Telling You the Truth

Teams learn what disagreement costs, so the truth gets softened on its way up. Leaders learn how to replace fear-based structures with honesty, trust, and teams that speak up.

Best for executive offsites, leadership development, and HR and people conferences.

TOPIC 04

The Stories Only You Can Tell

The experiences we dismiss as ordinary often hold the perspective that makes our work and leadership impossible to duplicate, and audiences learn how to find theirs.

Best for women's leadership events, ERGs, and professional development programs.

TOPIC 05

We Were Never Meant To Do This Alone

Ambition, motherhood, and the villages that carry us at work and at home, and what it takes to rebuild them.

Best for women's leadership events, parent and caregiver networks, and company-wide gatherings.

Every topic is available as a keynote, workshop, or fireside chat.

Don't see the perfect fit?

Maryam works with organizers to build a talk around your event, your audience, and the conversation you want them having on the way out.

What Audiences Experience

Maryam speaks the way she thinks:

directly, with specificity, and without the usual motivational softening. She draws on real moments from the studio boardroom, real campaigns that worked and ones that didn't, and real decisions she made under pressure. Audiences don't leave inspired in a vague way. They leave with a framework they can actually use.

Every keynote ends with something actionable, whether it's a new way to think about their own story, a method for building an argument that lands, or a clearer understanding of why the narratives they've accepted aren't actually theirs. The room leaves different than it arrived.

Meet Maryam

Maryam Mehrtash has spent twenty years studying what makes people pay attention, what makes ideas travel, and what ultimately makes people act.

As a senior marketing executive at Paramount, Marvel Studios, Disney, CBS Entertainment, and Tribune Media, she helped shape the strategy behind some of the world’s most recognizable franchises and cultural moments, including The GRAMMYs, Yellowstone, Star Trek, Paramount+, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. She architected the go-to-market advertising strategy for the launch of Paramount+ and built partnerships with companies including Google, Amazon, Apple, Visa, General Motors, and Walmart.

But two decades spent selling ideas, building brands, pitching executives, and watching great work live or die based on how it was communicated led Maryam to a much bigger question:

Why do some people, ideas, and organizations break through while others with every advantage get overlooked?

That question now sits at the center of her work.

Maryam writes and speaks about narrative, courage, leadership, and human behavior, examining the forces that shape what we believe, the decisions we make, and whether we have the courage to challenge the stories we’ve inherited about who we are and what is possible.

Her Substack, This Is Not A Memo, reached #6 on Substack’s Business chart within 24 hours of launch. She has spoken at industry conferences, led workshops for executives and organizations, and recently delivered the closing address at the Prohuman Foundation’s Renewing the Dream Gala, commemorating the 63rd anniversary of the March on Washington. On October 24, 2026, she takes the stage at TEDxArlington Heights.

After twenty years of helping some of the world’s most recognizable companies tell their stories, Maryam is now focused on helping people tell theirs.

Because great work doesn’t speak for itself.

Someone has to know how to make people listen.

Maryam's incredibly powerful work transcends the walls of the status quo that threaten to keep us small.

Maryam took the world by a storm when she entered the writing world. Whether she is showing us how to bust out of corporate strongholds, creating content that brings health and wellness to the forefront or giving us a lens into the Iranian immigrant experience, this is a woman to watch. She is rising, and she will crash through every glass ceiling, taking her audience right up to the highest zenith with her.