Jenny Odell

Speaker | Reclaim Your Time: A Tool to Revive Your Career

JENNY ODELL is a writer and artist whose work centers around the power of observation and attention in shaping our reality. Her first book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, is a New York Times bestseller that Barack Obama named as one of his favorite books of the year, How to Do Nothing resists categorization, touching on everything from ancient Greek philosophy to birding to labor strikes to performance art. Odell’s highly-anticipated, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock takes a deep dive into the fundamental structure of our society—time—and finds that the clock we live by was built for profit, not for humans. In her expansive, tailored talks to students, creatives, and communities, Odell shares powerful presentations that combine sociology, ecology, geology, economics, and cultural history to create a truly unique argument for reclaiming our relationships with attention and time. Odell is also a talented visual artist who has been exhibited at The Contemporary Jewish Museum, the New York Public Library, the Marjorie Barrick Museum, Les Rencontres D’Arles, Fotomuseum Antwerpen, Fotomuseum Winterthur, La Gaîté Lyrique, the Lishui Photography Festival, and apexart. She has also been an artist in residence at Recology San Francisco (a.k.a. “the dump”), the San Francisco Planning Department, the Internet Archive, and the Montalvo Arts Center. From 2013 to 2021, she taught digital art at Stanford University. Odell’s writing has also appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Sierra, and other publications. She lives in Oakland, California.