Matt Brehony

Meet our April 2025 speaker Matt Brehony / obrehon

As a brand professional, Matt Brehony is well versed in the way a business can use storytelling and identity to stick it to the competition. As a citizen, he’s watched, with increasing anxiety, as the same strategies have played out through the American electorate, leaving our country at a crossroads with itself.

So, what to do about it? Fighting with family members and strangers online only made things worse. Knocking doors every election cycle helped, but only on the margins.

So, Matt started channeling that anxiety into art, culminating with the release of Snowflakes - a suite of songs scrutinizing our era of division. Snowflakes exposes the fragility beneath our fury and the trouble to come if we can’t get our sh*t together (“we’re all snowflakes and the summer’s coming,” is the mantra that weaves throughout the record).

Matt has promised a talk that, despite the weighty subject matter, is shot through with absurdist humor, hard-earned hope, and only a sprinkle of shameless self-promotion for the new album. At the core of his argument is a belief that, by “breaking our binary minds,” we can shed our misconceptions of progress as a “this way or that way” proposition, and begin to approach our problems, and their potential solutions, with greater clarity, solidarity and creativity.