Full Name
Keely Cat-Wells
Job Title
Founder and President
Company
C Talent
Speaker Bio
Keely Cat-Wells is an Entrepreneur and Disability Activist dedicated to making social, systemic, and economic change. As the founder and CEO of C Talent Keely has been named a One Young World Entrepreneur of the Year 2022, Forbes 30 Under 30 Entertainment honouree, Diana Award winner, an AdWeek Young Influential, GBEA Young Entrepreneur of the Year, and has been appointed as an Advisory Board Member to Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation. Keely is a Forbes Contributor and has spoken as a Disability Subject Matter Expert for companies and organizations including, The LEGO Group, United Nations, Google, UCLA, NBC, Vidmob, Advertising Week, No Barriers USA (where she also serves as a Board Member), Cannes Film Festival, The Valuable 500, and Virgin Media’s Ultraviolet event among others. Keely has recently been chosen as a youth participant at the first Mental Health Youth Action Forum hosted by MTV Entertainment Group, in coordination with the Biden-Harris Administration and 18 leading mental health nonprofits. The forum will take place at the White House and drive culture from awareness to action on mental health through storytelling and media.
Keely founded her first company at a young age during her time in hospital, which developed into C Talent. C Talent is an award-winning talent management company that represents high-profile Deaf and Disabled talent. C Talent’s goal is to change the way the world views and defines disability, utilizing the entertainment, advertising, and media industries’ massive reach and power. C Talent works to place disabled talent into all roles, not just disability-specific roles – normalizing disabled people being experts in subjects beyond disability. C Talent has placed talent in thousands of projects with companies and brands such as Savage X Fenty, Hulu, About-Face, Disney, Google Pixel, Subaru, Nike and many more. C Talent is proud to represent a roster of artists who have a combined reach of over 50 million people!
C Talent provides Disability & Access consulting, building resilient infrastructure, promoting inclusive and sustainable industrialization, and fostering innovation, by helping companies become accessible beyond compliance, some of C Talent’s current and previous clients include; Virgin Media, Twitter, International Paralympic Committee, NBC, The LEGO Group, and GIPHY to name a few.
In 2021 C Talent was commissioned by Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity to create content for LIONS Decoded, a one-day broadcast of live and on demand content and insights, deconstructing the highest-ranked creative work in the world. C Talent received the 2021 Meaningful Business 100 Award, which recognizes outstanding business leaders, across the world, combining profit and purpose to help achieve the UN Global Goals. C Talent is an honouree of the Disability Specialist Award by RIDI, an award that recognizes a key player in the wider recruitment industry who embodies the model of best practice in providing inclusive recruitment and employment services. After noticing the lack of access in the entertainment industry, Keely formed Zetta Studios which is set to be the world’s first-ever studio to be designed with disabled people in mind.
C Talent serves as a founding member of #WeThe15, a Sports Emmy Nominated, British Arrow & Clio winning campaign being called sports most significant human rights movement in history – that aims to transform the lives of the one billion disabled people globally. Other founding members include; International Paralympic Committee (IPC) and International Disability Alliance (IDA), Special Olympics, Invictus Games Foundation, the International Committee of Sports for the Deaf (Deaflympics), UN Human Rights, UNESCO, the UN SDG Action Campaign, the European Commission, The Valuable 500, Global Citizen, Global Disability Innovation Hub, the UN Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC), International Disability and Development Consortium, C-Talent, Global Goals Advisory, ATscale – the Global Partnership for Assistive Technology, Zero Project, and the Global Alliance of Assistive Technology Organisations (GAATO). 
On the legislation side, Keely is working with Sara Hart Weir to eliminate section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act, an 80+-year-old discriminatory statute that provides the foundation of a system that permits employers of disabled workers to file for certificates that allows them to pay disabled employees subminimum wage – even to this date. We believe there is no right or left with disability, only forward.
“I believe to change the world; we have to learn to tell and listen to a new set of stories about the world we want to create, inaccessible spaces and with authentic voices. Knowledge is power, and the media is a global teacher whether we actively realize it when we are watching entertainment or not.”
Keely Cat-Wells