Lauren Napier is a writer, producer, author, entrepreneur and cultural commentator whose work explores power, poverty, ambition, identity and the increasingly fragile economics of American life. Her work is informed by an extraordinary personal trajectory.

After an extraordinary two decades working across television, film, beauty and media, Napier founded and built Lauren Napier Beauty into an internationally distributed skincare brand sold in more than 20 countries and through leading global retailers. She had built the kind of career and life conventionally associated with success and stability. 

Then she became homeless.

Napier spent seven months inside New York City’s shelter system, an experience that fundamentally altered both her life and the direction of her work. She experienced firsthand the bureaucracy, institutional delays, public policy and extraordinary expense embedded within the systems designed to address homelessness. While navigating her own path out, Napier engaged directly with government agencies, elected officials, public offices, housing advocates and policymakers. She brought her experience into public testimony and began examining the enormous divide between how homelessness policy is discussed, how public money is spent and what actually happens to the people living inside the system.

That experience became the foundation for her next body of work.

Napier is the creator, writer and producer of CEO to Homeless, a memoir-driven podcast chronicling the astonishing sequence of events that took her from entrepreneur and CEO to homelessness and into the complicated process of rebuilding her life.

But CEO to Homeless is not simply a story about homelessness. It is a story about what happens when ambition collides with circumstance. About class mobility in both directions. About the identities we construct around success and what remains when those structures disappear. And about how a woman who spent much of her career forecasting what would happen next failed to foresee the collapse of her own life.

Her work now moves across audio, publishing, television and film, combining memoir with reporting, cultural analysis, lived experience and public policy. Her perspective is shaped by an unusual proximity to radically different versions of American life: celebrity and shelter, entrepreneurship and poverty, global retail and government assistance, private industry and public bureaucracy.

It is that collision of worlds that defines her work as a storyteller. From CEO to homeless. From subject to storyteller. From surviving the story to producing it. Lauren Napier is writing what happened next.