Greenbuild's 2024 Keynote Speakers

Actor, Director, Activist, and Author, Don Cheadle will take the Greenbuild keynote stage on Wednesday, November 13, 2024, at 9am ET.

Don Cheadle is an Academy Award, Emmy and Golden Globe-nominated actor who has appeared in hit movies, including “Iron Man,” “Crash,” “Hotel Rwanda,” and “Avengers: End Game.”

Cheadle also executive produced and starred in the hit Showtime series “House of Lies,” earning four Emmy nominations. He also starred in Showtime’s “Black Monday” which garnered him two Emmy nominations and a Golden Globe Award nomination. Upcoming Cheadle stars in the Peacock series “Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist” and in the Amazon film “Unstoppable.”

Cheadle is known as an advocate for renewable energy and addressing climate change. He has made combating climate change a critical part of his life by serving as a standing U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) Goodwill Ambassador.

As part of the TED Countdown initiative, which champions and accelerates solutions to achieve a zero-carbon world, Cheadle was also a creator and a host of “The Years of Living Dangerously,” a Showtime documentary about climate change and its impact on the world, featured by the National Geographic Society.

In addition to his many acting honors, Cheadle also produced the documentary film “Darfur Now,” which examines the genocide in Sudan’s western region of Darfur. In 2007, he and George Clooney were recognized for their work for Darfur, sharing a Peace Summit Award at the World Summit of Nobel Peace Prize Laureates in Rome. Cheadle’s eclectic body of work offers the Greenbuild audience a thoughtful, global perspective on some of the most pressing issues that affect our world today. In 2024, Cheadle received theGrio Awards Environmental Champion Icon carrying on his long standing commitment to making climate change a critical part of his life.

Cheadle also executive produced and starred in the hit Showtime series “House of Lies,” earning four Emmy nominations. Most recently, Cheadle stars in the television series “Black Monday” on Showtime.

View the press release here.

“I hope to use my ‘celebrity’ to motivate people and contribute to moving our global society back from the brink. I am surprised environment is not at the top of the agenda. What is more important than food and clean air? We need a big push.” - Don Cheadle, Actor, Director, Activist, and Author.

Karen Weigert is the director of the Baumhart Center, an interdisciplinary center that equips leaders with the business tools to accelerate social impact. The center is home to the Baumhart Scholars MBA, a highly selective program that prepares working professionals to marry profit and purpose in their careers. She will also be an executive lecturer in the Department of Management. Weigert has a strong track record within all sectors—government, business, and nonprofit—and an unwavering commitment to driving social change through cross-sectoral collaboration and skill building.

Among her past roles are serving as the first-ever chief sustainability officer for the City of Chicago, where she led the planning and delivery of the award-winning Sustainable Chicago Action Agenda. This work included launching Retrofit Chicago which now serves over 100 buildings representing over 50 million square feet and the Energy Benchmarking ordinance which requires benchmarking, verification, and transparency on energy use in large buildings; buildings covered by the ordinance have saved over $60 million in energy costs. Karen’s previous roles have included working as a strategy consultant at McKinsey, a documentary film writer and producer of Carbon Nation, and an executive leader at Slipstream, which is a nonprofit dedicated to accelerating climate solutions for everyone. She is also a founding board member of ecountabl, a B Corp that connects consumers to brands that share their values, and a board member of the U.S. Green Building Council, which promotes sustainability through its LEED building certification.

Within higher education, she served as the sustainability executive in residence at the University of Chicago’s Rustandy Center for Social Sector Innovation and an adjunct professor for sustainability strategy in organizations for Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering.

Her thought leadership has been featured by CBS This Morning, Chicago Tonight, the Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, and Crain’s Chicago Business. She is also the regular sustainability contributor for WBEZ’s flagship show.

Futurist, Author, and Founder of Longpath Labs, Ari Wallach, will take the Greenbuild keynote stage on Friday, November 15, 2024, at 11:30am ET.

Ari Wallach is a futurist who has been working with leading global organizations for over 20 years, helping them envision and create better tomorrows.

He is the founder of Longpath Labs, an initiative focused on bringing long-term thinking and coordinated behavior to the individual, organizational, and societal realms to ensure humanity flourishes on an ecologically thriving planet Earth for centuries to come.

He is the creator and host of the PBS six-part docuseries "A Brief History of the Future" and the author of Longpath: Becoming the Great Ancestors Our Future Needs. His TED talk on Longpath has been viewed over 2.7 million times and translated into 21 languages.

Ari is the author of Longpath: Becoming the Great Ancestors Our Future Needs by HarperOne, and his TED talk on Longpath has been viewed over 2.7 million times and translated into 21 languages. Wallach was also the founder and CEO of Synthesis Corp., a New York-based strategic innovation consultancy whose clients included CNN, Volkswagen Global, The UN Refugee Agency, and the US State Department. Wallach co-founded the 2008 presidential initiative "The Great Schlep with Sarah Silverman" and previously hosted Fast Company magazine's Fast Company Futures with Ari Wallach. He was an adjunct associate professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, lecturing on innovation, AI, and the future of governance and public policy.

Rhiannon Jacobsen is the Managing Director of U.S. Market Transformation & Development at the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). In this role, Rhiannon leads a nationwide team focused upon realizing the organization’s mission to transform the way buildings and communities are designed, built and operated, enabling an environmentally and socially responsible, healthy, and prosperous environment that improves the quality of life. She directs and engages USGBC’s U.S. market transformation and development through local communities, members, volunteers, clients, thought leaders, and stakeholders.

A fifteen+-year veteran of USGBC, Rhiannon’s accomplishments and contributions are varied. One of Rhiannon’s areas of specialization includes the philanthropic engagement of corporations and foundation. Through this work she has raised more than $10 million in charitable funds for the Council. Her career started with USGBC as a member of the leadership team for the award-winning Greenbuild International Conference & Expo.