Cynthia Johnson is an entrepreneur, marketer, author, and educator based in Los Angeles. She is the co-founder and chief executive officer of 📝Bell+Ivy, the personal branding and integrated marketing agency she started in 2016 with 📝Zach Binder, and the author of 📝Platform: The Art and Science of Personal Branding (📝Penguin Random House, 2019). For more than a decade her work has been to make personal branding a discipline — teachable, evidence-based, and available to everyone rather than the well-networked few.

Johnson began on the content-creation side of social media and built her career outward from there. She was Partner and Director of Marketing at the digital agency 📝RankLab, then Director of Brand Development at 📝American Addiction Centers after RankLab's 2015 acquisition, and from 2016 the founder of the agency first incorporated as Ipseity, Inc. and rebranded the following year as Bell+Ivy. Her campaigns have spanned PayPal, American Express, Levi's, and Vans; she has written for 📝Entrepreneur and the 📝Rolling Stone Culture Council; and she has keynoted stages from the World Government Summit in Dubai to Web Summit in Lisbon.

Her current work returns to the name she started with. 📝Ipseity: Academy of the Self is her school of selfhood, built on a single conviction: the deeper challenge beneath personal branding was never branding at all — it was self-identity. She teaches people to understand and operate the self as a system, so that identity emerges consciously through the self rather than unconsciously through the systems around them. Alongside the academy she co-hosts the author-interview show 📝Best Seller Live and chairs 📝WonderKey Collective, the nonprofit she co-founded to close the digital divide for youth aging out of foster care and stable housing.

This library is Cynthia Johnson's external brain — a connected map of the people, companies, ideas, and writing that shape her work across personal branding, education, and the study of the self.