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Founder and Principal, Blue Lotus Advisors

For 15+ years, Deepa Gupta has served organizations in the public, nonprofit and private sector such as The Boeing Company, the MacArthur Foundation, and McKinsey & Company, to design and drive cross-sector initiatives for social and economic impact. She founded her own independent consultancy called Blue Lotus Advisors in the fall of 2019.

She has deep experience and is skilled in leadership development, strategy and organizational design and development, stakeholder and community engagement, philanthropy, systems change, performance management, impact analytics, and communications.

Deepa most recently spent 7 years at Boeing, first as a director overseeing their strategies in community investments and engagement in global education from early education through grade 12, and from 2016-2019, served as chief of staff supporting the human and digital transformation of their human resources organization and the founding director of a 25-person team focused on organizational redesign, culture change and performance management for Boeing globally.

She started her career in health care, first as a student of biology and health policy at the University of Chicago, and then in her work serving hospitals and health systems at the Advisory Board Company; in policy and communications with the Global Health Bureau, Office of Reproductive Health at USAID; and at McKinsey & Company first in their hospital/health system work and then in their global / public health practice serving multilateral, bilateral and nonprofit organizations through what was then their Social Sector Office.

At the MacArthur Foundation, she led grantmaking in arts and culture, international partnerships, and capacity building for paradigm-shifting nonprofits across health, justice, arts, media, journalism, environment and community and economic development.

​She currently serves on the boards of Ingenuity, Inc., which works to ensure all Chicago Public School students receive arts education; the National Council for the Arts at the invitation of President Obama; and Project Y Theatre Company, an itinerant, NYC-based theatre company focused on inclusive storytelling in a digital age.  She has previously served on the boards of the National Kidney Foundation of Illinois, New Teacher Center, and New Leaders Chicago. She is active in her community in Oak Park, Illinois, supporting leadership initiatives at Oak Park/River Forest High School and grant review in service to the Oak Park Arts Council. 

Deepa earned degrees in biology and public policy at the University of Chicago; an MBA at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management; and an MPA at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.