Meet the curators for Shift UX 2026

If you’re thinking about what it means to practice UX in a moment when roles, tools, and titles are all in flux, Shift 2026 is the place to work through those questions. Taking place September 23-25, 2026 in New York City and live online, our curators bring together practitioners who are actively redefining what UX work looks like, not just theorizing about it.

• How UX practitioners are stepping up as champions of ethics inside their organizations, not just their designs.
• The human side of the work — the people skills that matter as much as any framework or tool.
• What happens as digital and physical design increasingly merge into a single practice.
• First-hand accounts of navigating blurring roles, and what that means for how teams actually get work done.
• Honest reflections on doing good UX work inside complex, distributed organizations — and what still gets in the way.

Our curators include Abby Covert on systems-level thinking, Jemma Ahmed on research as strategy, Stefanie Hutka on human-centered tooling, and Jon Fukuda on operations as orchestration.