We are thrilled to announce a first look at this year’s Crossover Day programming! Join us on Thursday, March 12 for a full day of discovery as we bring together communities from SXSW EDU and SXSW.
In the powerful Keynote, bestselling author Jennifer B. Wallace will dive into mattering as the secret to lifelong wellbeing, deep connections, and purpose. Also, don’t miss the newest Featured Sessions, where speakers will explore how to effectively design and fund programs leveraging advanced technology to support teachers and students and how to transform the chaos into strategy for reinventing new possibilities across the education landscape.
Plus, new for 2026, you will have more to explore on Crossover Day than ever before! For the first time, SXSW EDU badgeholders will have access to SXSW Innovation Conference programming with over 25 sessions, workshops and mentors, select SXSW Film & TV Festival screenings, and all of the SXSW Music Festival showcases on Thursday, March 12. The sky is the limit for what you can experience.
Don’t miss the Crossover Day Mixer, presented by Imaginable Futures, where you can access cross-industry connection, conversation, and collaboration with our global network of event attendees Thursday, March 12 from 5pm to 7pm.
Stay tuned for the full Crossover Day lineup, but you can explore the schedule and start saving your favorites now! Session dates and times will be announced soon.
Crossover Day Keynote
A Conversation with Jennifer B. Wallace
Bestselling author Jennifer B. Wallace explores mattering—the human need to feel valued and add value—as the secret ingredient to lifelong wellbeing and the key to deep connections and purpose. Drawing on global research and powerful stories, she reveals how mattering offers a potent antidote to loneliness and burnout, and delivers practical takeaways to help people unlock mattering at home, at work, and in the wider world.
Jennifer B. Wallace, Bestselling Author, The Mattering Institute
Crossover Day Featured Sessions
Moonshots That Move the Needle
Advanced tech is quickly expanding the ways we can support teachers and students both in and out of the classroom. But how do we design and fund programs that turn potential into impact? This panel explores how setting bold, time-bound learning goals can accelerate and level-up innovation while catalyzing impactful financial support. From coordinated research programs to targeted funding strategies, this session will explore how moonshot-centered models can rally diverse innovators around a shared outcome, encourage rigorous validation, and accelerate breakthroughs for teaching and learning.
Arati Prabhakar, Former Presidential Science & Technology Advisor, Office of Science and Technology (Biden Administration) Kumar Garg, President, Renaissance Philanthropy Jamie Sterling, Vice President of Product, Research & Development, Carnegie Learning Eden Xenakis, Chief of Staff, Bezos Family Foundation
Strategy in the Times of Chaos: Imagining Futures of Education
Daily, we wake to the unimaginable becoming reality: the highest temperatures in recorded history, technology acquiring human-like communication capabilities, realignment of global alliances and ideologies. Such times of upheaval are opportunities to reinvent the institutions, ways of thinking, and modes of doing. Sociologist John Fabian Witt said, these are “occasions in which people remake the world.” In this conversation, experts with decades of experience in future-facing strategies, will share foresight techniques for imagining radically different futures and detecting signals of reinvention and scholarship on how communities depicted as under-resourced create practices and institutions of their own—as examples for building more just and equitable futures.
Marina Gorbis, Executive Director, Institute for the Future Dr. Maisha T. Winn, Professor, Stanford University
Don’t Miss Out On SXSW EDU 2026
Register and book your hotel today to break new ground in education through compelling sessions, in-depth workshops, mentorship, film screenings, trailblazing competitions, a dynamic expo, networking opportunities, and so much more at SXSW EDU from March 9-12, 2026.
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SXSW EDU 2026 Speaker photos (left to right in order of appearance): Jennifer B. Wallace, Arati Prabhakar, Kumar Garg, Jamie Sterling, Eden Zenakis, Marina Gorbis, Dr. Maisha T. Winn
