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Preeta D. Bansal


Preeta Bansal has spent more than 30 years in senior roles in government, global business, and corporate law practice – as General Counsel and Senior Policy Advisor in the Executive Office of the U.S. President (White House), Solicitor General of the State of New York, partner and practice chair at Skadden Arps, global general counsel in London for one of the world’s largest banks, a US diplomat and Chair of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, and law clerk to US Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. She has advised on the drafting of the constitutions of Iraq and Afghanistan. After a long career scaling the heights of external and institutional power, she has spent the last 6 years more deeply plumbing depths of being for the source of – and ancient tools for accessing – internal power, as well as studying network science and the role of emerging technologies in amplifying small shifts in behavior and consciousness.

Preeta Bansal is a Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute, a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and an independent corporate director of Nelnet, Inc., as well as a board member of the Lincoln Community Foundation and an Advisory Board member of the Johnny Carson Center for the Emerging Media Arts. She graduated from Lincoln East High School, Harvard College, and Harvard Law School. As a lecturer at MIT, she teaches on topics related to reclaiming human wisdom and authentic power in an age of artificial intelligence, exponential technology, and disrupted social and governance institutions, and this will be the focus of her TEDxLincoln talk.