Alexia Leibbrandt: bio and press kit

Graphic facilitation · Visual strategy · Collaborative intelligenceAlexia Leibbrandt steps in when a team has to decide, reach agreement or win people over.
Her conviction: a live drawing does not illustrate a meeting, it lets the group see itself think.

Ready-to-use bio

Alexia Leibbrandt (Bigsista) is a graphic facilitator and visual strategist based in Paris. After working in graphic design and journalism, she has put collaborative intelligence to work for leaders and teams since 2012, turning their complex conversations into clear visual maps, in English and French. One of the pioneers of live scribing in France, she created the cover drawing for a chapter of the UNESCO Science Report 2021.This text may be reused as it is, with a link to this page.

When to call on her

  • For a leadership seminar or an executive committee, Alexia Leibbrandt makes decisions, priorities and disagreements visible in real time.
  • For an international conference, she provides live graphic recording in English or French, on large-format paper or digitally.
  • For a team that wants to align, she maps what is truly shared and what is not yet.
  • For a transformation or innovation programme, she links the workshops with a visual thread that gives the whole programme coherence.
  • For hybrid or remote sessions, she draws live on screen to give rhythm and a human touch to the exchange.
  • For neurodivergent audiences, she offers visual, non-linear formats where images replace jargon.

Visual strategy for high-stakes projects

When a team has to win people over, for a tender, an investment committee, a board meeting or a strategic launch, Alexia Leibbrandt helps it find the thread of its story and make it visible in a single image. She works upstream to bring out the intent of the event and frame the key messages to include, then on the day itself to capture what is said in real time, on site or by video call.What comes out of it: a one-page visual summary, a story architecture, a model of the strategy and visuals drawn live during the presentation.

Detailed portrait

Identity and background

Alexia Leibbrandt has practised graphic facilitation in Paris, across France and internationally since 2012. Journalism and graphic design sharpened her eye: going straight to the meaning, finding the right question, checking the facts, ranking information through headlines, shapes and their layout, and leaving white space so the page can breathe. She was among the first to practise live scribing in France, long before the field became mainstream, with more than four hundred sessions for leaders, teams and international organisations.A bilingual French graphic facilitator with Eswatini, Russian and German roots, she is the daughter of Constance Scholastica Leibbrandt, a former UNESCO official, and the granddaughter of Dr Victor Sydney Leibbrandt, former Minister of Transport and Technology of Swaziland (now Eswatini). This transcontinental heritage informs her perspective on culture, transmission and collective imagination, and a plural sensitivity that shows in the way she represents ideas. Her practice rests on visual thinking, precise listening and a confident graphic intuition, blending analytical structure with artistic clarity. To this she adds a deft sense of humour, often slipped into the drawing itself: a sketched wink eases the tension, makes hard messages easier to hear and gives the group the distance it needs to face them.

Expertise and references

She turns complex discussions, in real time, into simple, readable visual frameworks that teams can use immediately. Her murals help people think together, decide faster and see what they cannot always put into words, and her diagrams declutter executives’ thinking.Her work supports transformation, innovation, collective intelligence, leadership alignment and high-complexity discussions. She is also often called on for subjects that defend and promote women, minority inclusion and child welfare. Based in Paris, she works across France, Europe, the United States, the United Arab Emirates and the Gulf region, Africa and Asia.Her clients include UNESCO, the United Nations, the European Union, the City of Paris, the Collège des Bernardins, ministries, innovation labs, business schools such as HEC Paris and INSEAD, and international transformation teams at groups such as Microsoft, Google, Veolia, Orange, L’Oréal and Chanel. In 2021, UNESCO commissioned her cover drawing for the chapter “Women and the digital revolution” of its Science Report.

Approach and method

In the service of collaborative intelligence, she has developed a hybrid approach that combines live drawing, strategic listening and structure. Her style blends drawing, narrative, symbols, movement and attentive presence. She listens to a group the way a musician reads a score, and each nuance can become a symbol.She creates moments of collective flow, where thinking becomes more fluid, ideas organise themselves and decisions come more naturally. Her work relies on the rhythm of the group and on representing both what is said and what is implied, a sensitivity that makes the difference in complex settings and uncertain times.She works as a neutral visual partner, not a designer who decorates content: for her, graphic facilitation is a strategic discipline, not an ornament.

The Bigsista universe

She created Bigsista in 2010 as a comic blog, posting short scenes from life and existential questions in a few panels, three times a week, with no drafts. That practice taught her the letting go and improvisation that live scribing demands.Under that name, she now develops an organic visual language (NeuroSketching) made of intuition, gesture and image. She designs murals and workshop formats that help people recover meaning, energy and a more grounded vision.Her vision workshops, for women entrepreneurs and teams seeking alignment, help participants clarify a multi-year direction, structure their ideas and turn intuition into a tangible path, making visible what was scattered. She created the Secret Game, an immersive programme for personal and professional realignment, whose two-day introductory workshop in Paris, The Call, blends visual, vocal and physical improvisation. She is trained in maieutic hypnosis and spiritual hypnosis. She is certified in leading vocal improvisation by the Música do Círculo Institute, after completing its official two-year training (March 2026). Música do Círculo is a pedagogy and practice of collective music-making, founded in Brazil by Pedro Consorte, Ronaldo Crispim and Zuza Gonçalves. In recent years, she has also brought graphic facilitation to vocal improvisation retreats: her drawings help participants step back and see what emerges from the songs, beyond words.

Experimenting with virtual reality

Alongside her practice, Alexia Leibbrandt is experimenting with virtual reality: scribing in volume, walking inside ideas and mapping a strategy as a space you can move through.

Neurodiversity, inclusion and the As If podcast

Neurodivergent herself, Alexia Leibbrandt knows from the inside what visual thinking offers people who think better in images than in words. Her practice favours clarity, intuition and readability over cognitive overload. It is the thread running through As If, the podcast in which she holds long conversations with neurodivergent and creative minds (in French).

What she offers

Speaking topics

  • Making visible what a team believes it shares: visual strategy for real alignment.
  • Thinking differently: what neurodivergent minds bring to collective intelligence.
  • Improvising to decide: voice, movement and drawing as tools for leadership and creation.

Useful links

Photos and visuals

High-resolution photos for press and event organisers. Credit: © Alexia Leibbrandt.

Press and speaking contact

For interviews, speaking invitations, podcast appearances or image requests: contact Alexia Leibbrandt.Version française : Alexia Leibbrandt, biographie et kit presse.