Richard Richards

Richard Richards has traveled wide and far in his varied leadership and training roles in the corporate world. Originally from the UK, he has lived and worked in the USA, Germany, Egypt, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Hong Kong. While leading teams in Australia, Korea, Israel, China, Mariana Islands, Germany, Chile, Argentina and Mexico, he continued to hone his cross-cultural, leadership, systems implementation, organizational development, instructional design, and facilitation skills. In addition, he has owned two businesses: a fine art gallery specializing in Latin American art and a training consulting practice.

Until recently The Ariel Group’s Vice President of Learning Design, he has reconfigured his relationship with the Ariel Group (and his life in general) to allow him to explore people and leadership development opportunities with alternative populations, including prisoners, formerly incarcerated individuals, their loved ones and at-risk youth.

Richard has a BSc (Hons) from the University of Surrey in the UK and an MA in Applied Learning, from the School for New Learning at DePaul University in Chicago, focusing on “The Use of the Arts in Community Building and Social Change.” This degree began life as “The Use of Theatre to Describe, Understand and Modify People’s Perceptions and Behavior”—a focus that continued to inform his final degree and foreshadowed his relationship with The Ariel Group and subsequent non-profit work.

As a professional actor, Richard has studied improvisation at Second City in Chicago and has worked on stage, in voice-over and in film, and plans to write and perform narrative monologues – something he has done in the past - in his reconfigured life.