Brené Brown

Casandra Brené Brown, born November 18, 1965, is an American academic, author, and podcaster whose work brought the language of shame, vulnerability, courage, empathy, and leadership into everyday public conversation. The eldest of four children, with a family in New Orleans, Louisiana, Brown built her career in social work. She earned a Bachelor of Social Work from the University of Texas at Austin in 1995, a Master of Social Work in 1996, and a Ph.D. in social work from the University of Houston Graduate School of Social Work in 2002.

Brown has spent her research career as a professor at the University of Houston’s Graduate College of Social Work, studying how human connection works. She is the Huffington Foundation’s Brené Brown Endowed Chair at that college and a visiting professor in management at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. Her academic focus has stayed close to the subjects that made her widely known: courage, vulnerability, shame, empathy, and leadership.

Her public audience grew sharply after her 2010 TEDx Houston talk, “The Power of Vulnerability,” became one of the five most viewed TED talks. The talk summarized a decade of her research on shame in personal and self-deprecating terms, moving her work from relative obscurity in academia into the mainstream spotlight. She followed it with “Listening to Shame” in 2012, and also gave a 2010 TEDxKC talk, “The Price of Invulnerability,” in which she explained that numbing hard feelings can also numb joy.

Brown is the author of six number-one New York Times bestselling books: The Gifts of Imperfection, Daring Greatly, Rising Strong, Braving the Wilderness, Dare to Lead, and Atlas of the Heart. She discussed Daring Greatly with Oprah Winfrey on Super Soul Sunday in March 2013. Atlas of the Heart, published in November 2021, was written to help readers expand the emotional vocabulary they use to communicate their feelings. With Tarana Burke, Brown also co-created You Are Your Best Thing: Vulnerability, Shame Resilience, and the Black Experience, an anthology by Black writers on white supremacy, Black love, and Black life.

Her work has also reached audiences through film, television, and audio. In 2019, she appeared in the Netflix filmed lecture Brené Brown: The Call to Courage, where she discussed choosing courage over comfort and connected bravery with vulnerability. In 2022, HBO Max released the five-part docuseries Brené Brown: Atlas of the Heart. Brown began hosting the Unlocking Us and Dare to Lead podcasts in 2020, and Unlocking Us won the iHeartRadio Podcast Award for Best Advice or Inspirational Podcast in 2021.

Brown’s thought has also been shaped by personal experience. She is married, has two children, and lives in Houston, Texas. She has spoken about past addictions to alcohol, smoking, emotional eating, and control, as well as the positive impact of stopping drinking and smoking on May 12, 1996, one day after her master’s program graduation. That openness helps explain why her words still travel widely. When she writes, “Owning your story can be hard, but not nearly as hard as spending your whole life running from it,” the line reflects the same plain-spoken focus that runs through her research, teaching, books, and public talks.