About michelle

Michelle MiJung Kim is one of today’s most compelling voices on courage, leadership, and social justice.

She is the award-winning author of The Wake Up, a globally recognized speaker, and the producer and host of I Feel That Way Too—a Signal Award-winning podcast that dares to ask life’s trickiest questions so we can feel less alone and more courageous together.

As a queer Korean American woman writer and activist, Michelle’s work lives at the intersection of personal and organizational transformation, storytelling, and social justice. Whether on the page or behind a mic, she invites her audience to explore the distance between courage and fear, and the connection between the personal and the political.

Michelle has lived many lives in one: immigrating to the U.S. from Korea, causing “good trouble” as a youth activist, managing teams as a senior leader in tech, building a successful social enterprise, and finding her way through burnout and depression. Across these seemingly paradoxical worlds, she’s learned that courage is needed everywhere and transformation can happen anywhere.

As the founding CEO of Awaken, Michelle partnered with hundreds of high-performing organizations and executive leaders across tech, media, universities, and nonprofits to create more equitable and inclusive cultures. Today, she brings that same rigor to the broader public stage through her speaking and podcast, inspiring personal and collective transformation globally.

Her work has been featured in Harvard Business Review, Forbes, The New York Times, NPR, and MSNBC. She is a LinkedIn Top Voice, a Fast Company Queer 50 honoree, and a two-time Signal Award winner. Her book, The Wake Up, is the Nautilus Book Award Gold Medal winner and the recipient of Porchlight’s Best Book of the Year Award.

Michelle currently serves on the board of Asian Americans for Civil Rights and Equality (AACRE), and is a proud alumna of UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. She lives in Oakland, California with her two rambunctious orange cats.

“Michelle is a gifted storyteller who can bring a wide range of people together. That really is a gift that you don’t see often, especially these days.”

— Thomas S. SVP of Marketing, SF Based Technology Company

Michelle’s approach to transformation

Michelle is a firm believer in the power of storytelling. Too many hyper-intellectualize the work of creating change and as an organizational consultant, Michelle has seen first hand the damage such practice can cause. By revitalizing the human-centered approach through inspiring stories, Michelle connects people to the heart of the matter—this is human work.
Building a more equitable, free, and safe world is a long journey that requires every single one of us to show up with integrity. Making mistakes and unintentionally causing harm is an inevitable part of this work and Michelle believes in the power of balancing both criticality and compassion to make the journey sustainable and joyful.
Michelle is known for her ability to make complex ideas clear and compelling to everyone regardless of their level of awareness. In a society that prioritizes artificial politeness over courageous truth telling, she believes speaking with clarity and precision is paramount to creating real, honest change. She also believes we can achieve this by meeting people where they are, without diluting or losing integrity.
Audre Lorde said, “Without community, there is no liberation.” In order to create sustainable change, we must be connected to other values-aligned people. All of Michelle’s talks and workshops emphasize the importance of building community and resilient relationships, so we can build principled solidarity and move together toward collective liberation.
By sharing deeply personal and vulnerable stories, Michelle inspires her audience to embark on their own healing journey. Michelle believes in the importance of taking shame and isolation away from our struggles, so that we can heal together. Ultimately, all social change is rooted in our collective healing—healing from historical and past traumas and preventing new traumas from being inflicted.
Whether it’s practicing accountability or speaking about topics that are stigmatized, modeling vulnerability and courage is essential to inspiring others to do the same. “We teach what we need to learn” is a reminder Michelle lives by that grounds her own actions and stories. By leading with her own truths, Michelle shows her audience how to be, rather than lecturing them on what to do.