Thaler Pekar

Founder & Director, Thaler Pekar & Partners

Hoboken, NJ

Thaler Pekar is an internationally-recognized pioneer in narrative, story, and communication. Both the BBC and the Smithsonian Institution have hailed her as one of the world’s leading experts on institutional storytelling.

For 17 years, her firm, Thaler Pekar & Partners, has advised leaders on being understood and influential. They deploy trademarked tools that provide people with the confidence to speak, listen, and be heard. And they guide visionaries in linking projects and challenges to the narrative of their institution’s past, present, and future. As a result, teams are more effective, audiences are more receptive, income and donations increase, and visibility and influence rise.

Their award-winning work ranges from gathering 178 oral histories across four continents and six countries for Chuck Feeney’s The Atlantic Philanthropies (archived at Cornell University and available to the public in 2020); to finding and refining stories about integrity for Novartis senior leadership; to coaching a main stage TED Talker; and to developing a Narrative Academy for international educators of L’Oreál.

“Building smart & narrative organizations, & developing smart & storied leaders.”

Thaler’s curiosity has compelled her eclectic work: she has served as the public affairs director for a large Federally Qualified Community Health Center; as the communications director for The Children’s Health Fund; as the communications lead for a large Ford Foundation project on religious pluralism; and as a founding producer of State of Belief on Air America Radio. She is a Founding Member of the American College of Women’s Health Physicians and has studied at the Columbia University Medical Center Program in Narrative Medicine. Thaler is a visiting lecturer at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University Executive Masters program.