Jessica Lopez

Jessica Lopez is a disability keynote speaker and tech marketing strategist. Her career combines lived experience with institutional leadership and applied strategy through marketing and policy.

 

She was born without hands and feet and arrived without a heartbeat. She spent three weeks in the pediatric ICU after slipping into a coma. After making a full recovery, she attended mainstream schools and trained in the performing arts at her elementary school. At the age of 10, health challenges disrupted her straight-A academic timeline, leading to a delayed high school graduation. She ultimately graduated during the pandemic after completing two years of high school in less than four months through online learning.

 

College marked a turn toward leadership. Jessica served as President of Student Government and held district-level student leadership roles across California. Her advocacy work during this period resulted in her authoring and passing a statewide disability inclusion resolution impacting two million community college students. The resolution expanded disability visibility and disability curriculum across the California education system.

 

Taking this one step forward, she led a year long policy study funded by the Robert and Ethel Kennedy Center for Human Rights, examining disability governance in higher education across all fifty states. The resulting 118-page Anti-Ableism in Higher Education report has been downloaded over 1,000 times and shared with 300+ institutions across 4 continents.

 

Her work has earned national recognition, including a fifty-thousand-dollar Obama-Chesky Voyager Scholarship. The scholarship supported debt-free completion of her Bachelor’s in Business Administration as a first-generation student. It also provided funding for travel to support her thesis exploration of accessibility in real environments.

 

Her professional experience includes marketing and strategy roles across tech industries. Jessica most recently worked at Amazon on employer branding and recruiting initiatives tied to disability and global talent strategy. She also serves as a Digital Accessibility and Marketing Consultant at the Center for Disability Inclusion where she leads marketing and digital accessibility initiatives for national partners.

 

Bringing her lived experience as a disabled leader, Jessica is a keynote speaker and consultant on disability and accessibility. Jessica delivers keynotes on disability, technology, marketing, and access grounded in lived experience and institutional practice. She has shared her powerful insights at venues all across the U.S., as well as at national conferences and institutional events. Her keynotes leave audiences with a newfound appreciation for the role of disability inclusion and accessibility in sparking innovation.