Ipseity, also styled "Ipseity: Academy of the Self," is a 📝Personal Branding education venture founded by 📝Cynthia Johnson in Los Angeles. The academy delivers workshops, talks, and self-identity programs that teach individuals — students, professionals, and founders — how to articulate, position, and develop a personal brand. Its curriculum draws on the same frameworks Johnson codified in her book 📝Platform: The Art and Science of Personal Branding.
The name derives from ipseity, the philosophical term for the quality of selfhood — fitting for a program built around self-identity as the foundation of brand. Ipseity sits alongside 📝Bell+Ivy, Johnson's full-service PR and personal branding agency, as the education-and-cohort counterpart: where Bell+Ivy is the done-for-you retainer practice serving founders, speakers, and investors, Ipseity is the teach-them-to-do-it-themselves arm. The academy has been brought into institutional settings including Yale School of Management's Women in Management community, where Johnson led a workshop on self-identity and personal branding under the Academy of the Self banner.
Cynthia's academy. This is the version of her work that scales to people who can't afford the Bell+Ivy retainer — and the place I'd point anyone serious about building a personal brand from first principles.