With over 20 years in innovation consulting and leading product design teams, Niteesh Elias built a career by using deep listening as a catalyst for creation. He has worked at Fortune 100 companies, like Honeywell, Inc., across China, India, Europe and North America in complex domains like retail, healthcare, industrial automation and aerospace. His work with these companies focused on designing and launching patented offerings, many of which won prestigious awards such as the 2022 Good Design Award.

With an educational background in business, technology and the visual arts, Niteesh thrives at the intersection of these disciplines. His passion for understanding people allowed him to relate easily with both creatives in the design studio, and executives in the boardroom. 

At Honeywell, Inc., Niteesh created the vision and led the implementation of the Customer Discovery practice by training several hundred product managers and technologists, as well as establishing standard practices and metrics to drive progress. This led to several thousand customer interviews being conducted on an annual basis, the outcomes of which were increased revenues from new product launches, as well as the decreased cost of R&D.

Niteesh also implemented this interview practice with the HR community at Honeywell by teaching them deep listening skills and conducting several hundred interviews with employees. These interviews helped the company to develop an employee-centric HR model.Niteesh grew up as a minority in India with Goan-Portuguese and indigenous Gond heritage and immigrated to the US as an adult. These formative experiences helped him to thrive at the periphery between cultures and geographies. His recent social listening initiatives in his home of Charlotte, such as It’s Soulful and It’s Survival: A Conversation with Four Drag Artivists in the South, a book he published with Brooke on the challenges faced by artists in the LGBTQIA+ community, and his association with the McColl Center, where he is part of the co-op program, have helped him to understand more deeply the unique challenges that artists and creative entrepreneurs face.

Brooke Shaffner grew up in a bicultural family, part Garza, part Shaffner, in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley—a 10-minute drive from Mexico. Her Garza grandfather was an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who worked as a farm laborer before putting himself through school to become a pharmacist. Her Shaffner grandfather was raised Mennonite and a first-generation college student. 

Brooke’s award-winning novel Country of Under was an act of generative listening ten years in the making. She listened deeply to many people—her Garza relatives, undocumented friends and students, immigration lawyers, an immigration judge, drag performers, subterranean explorers, activists, artists, priests, and nuns—to write a book that straddles borders, bringing together drag queens, nuns, activists, artists, and healers. 

Country of Under is about listening across differences and the unending work of transcending borders to bear witness to the wild possibility within all of us. At the heart of the novel is a transformative communal act of storytelling and listening. New York City’s Freedom Tunnel is central to this climax. Freedom Tunnel Press, the small press that Brooke co-founded with Niteesh, extends this act of generative listening to other voices that straddle borders. 

For Freedom Tunnel Press’s first book, It’s Soulful and It’s Survival: A Conversation with Four Drag Artivists in the South, Brooke devoted a month to listening to, transcribing and editing four hours of historic testimony from the incredible artivist drag performers who performed at our Double Book Launch + Drag Extravaganza. 

Brooke’s father became a quadriplegic when she was 10; at 23, she was diagnosed with the chronic progressive illness primary sclerosing cholangitis; and at 37, she lost a love to cancer. These experiences have led her to embrace our vulnerability, interconnectedness and mortality as powerful strengths. Brooke is currently at work on a memoir that explores living and loving in the face of radical uncertainty. An excerpt won the 2023 Lit/South Award and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  

Brooke has been awarded grants from the Arts & Science Council, United States Artists and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, the Saltonstall Foundation, the Edward Albee Foundation, the Jentel Foundation, the I-Park Foundation, the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, and VCCA-France. Through her company Between the Lines, Brooke has helped people from diverse backgrounds to powerfully tell their stories for admissions, scholarship, grant, fellowship and residency applications for 17 years. She’s also consulted organizations on storytelling in various forms.

Brooke has taught through the North Carolina Writers Network, Charlotte Writers Club, Rutgers University, The Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop, Charlotte Lit, Northwestern University’s Center for Talent Development, Athens Academy, the Globe Institute of Technology, College Strategies and GEAR UP. She has written curricula for schools in New York City, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Atlanta. Brooke received her MFA from Columbia University, where she was a Dean’s Fellow. At Davidson College, she won the Charles Lloyd Writing Award.