Wonder Woman in Business, Melissa Dinwiddie

Melissa Dinwiddie is the founder, CEO and lead facilitator of Creative Sandbox Solutions, a Silicon Valley-based consultancy that specializes in working with innovative, people-first companies grappling with boring (or nonexistent!) virtual trainings and events. She designs creative, interactive, playful experiences that attendees rave about because they acquire new skills and behaviors and build connections while having fun. One of her flagship offerings, Communicating for Influence is an active-learning program she initially developed for high-performance research teams at Facebook. An acclaimed creativity instigator, Melissa is the author of The Creative Sandbox Way: Your Path to a Full-Color Life, an interactive playbook that countless readers have sworn freed them from creative block virtually overnight. Melissa’s front-of-room experience ranges from traveling the country teaching calligraphy, to speaking on stages from Connecticut to California, to performing as a singer for audiences as big as 6,500, and presenting at professional conferences internationally. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, she’s become sought after for her expertise in play-based techniques for leading engaging, interactive virtual meetings. When there isn’t a global pandemic going on, she performs improv with a number of different groups in the San Francisco Bay Area. A graduate of UC Berkeley with a Bachelors in Social Science, and the University of Birmingham, England, with a Masters in Cultural Studies, Melissa lives with her husband in Silicon Valley and spends her free time making art, playing ukulele, or chasing after her rescue kittens, Vinnie and Jack Jack.