Available to book
Natalie Gumede
Diversity and Inclusion
Confidence
Resilience
Foster inclusive workplaces with Natalie Gumede, actor, event host, and diversity speaker. Natalie works with organisations on resilience, diversity and inclusion, and storytelling, drawing on award-winning television and live event experience.
Actor
Celebrity
Strictly Come Dancing
Event Hosts
Award Hosts
Inclusion
Mental Health Awareness
Mindset
Personal Development
Personal Wellbeing
Female Empowerment
Mentor
Emcee
Natalie Gumede is an English actor, event host, and speaker who helps organisations explore resilience, inclusion, identity, and authentic leadership through stories drawn from more than two decades in television and live performance.
Natalie is best known for playing Kirsty Soames in Coronation Street, a role that earned British Soap Awards for Best Newcomer, Villain of the Year, and Best Dramatic Performance. She was runner-up on Strictly Come Dancing in 2013, and has appeared in productions including Doctor Who, Free Rein, Strike, Titans, and Your Christmas Or Mine. Alongside her screen career, she hosts corporate events, awards ceremonies, and fashion events.
Drawing on her experience as a mixed-race woman from a working-class background, Natalie brings a practical perspective on resilience, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and adapting to change. She also shares lessons from navigating rejection in the entertainment industry, building confidence under pressure, and using storytelling to strengthen communication, learning, and connection. Her work as a mentor and qualified yoga teacher adds further insight into wellbeing, self-regulation, and supporting others through change.
Audiences leave with practical ways to communicate more effectively, approach setbacks with greater confidence, and create environments where people feel seen and included. Her sessions combine honest personal experiences with applicable ideas for developing resilience, strengthening workplace relationships, and finding renewed purpose throughout a career.
Book Natalie to bring credible lived experience, thoughtful conversation, and an engaging presence to conferences, leadership events, and awards ceremonies.
Topics, sessions and talks
Growing up bi-racial in a small Lancastrian town, Natalie Gumede learned early what it felt like not to fit in. Drawing on her own upbringing, she explores how the discomfort of standing out can become a source of connection rather than isolation. Natalie challenges audiences to see difference as an asset, showing how embracing identity, rather than masking it, is often what allows a community to find you.
Natalie Gumede has had a performing career spanning over twenty years as a mixed-race, working-class woman. In this talk, she shares some of the adversity she has overcome and considers that if we can achieve great things without the support, we ALL need and deserve, then what could we achieve with it? In doing so, the conversation opens out to the ultimate goal - improving opportunities for the next generation.
Being an actor means facing one of the highest rates of rejection of any industry. Enduring through over two decades in show business has meant that Gumede has learned how to love both herself and the process. By seeing the no’s as redirection and listening in to what repeating patterns in one’s life and career highlight, Natalie invites the audience to tap into their own inner wisdom and values to prevail through a volatile work landscape.
As an actor, Natalie Gumede is often asked how she retains so much information. This talk is an actor’s guide to learning and discusses how, through telling stories, we not only connect with our audience, but retain a greater wealth of information ourselves. The magic in all information is the meaning behind it, and Natalie encourages the audience to find the ‘why’ in their work to improve efficiency, purpose and satisfaction.
Are you still in the career you trained for as a teenager? Does it still fit the person you are now? As we enter mid-life, career satisfaction can be one of many areas we want to appraise. Drawing on her own experience, Natalie Gumede shares the signs that it may be time to Reassess, how to Reinvigorate the same career, or Reinvent yourself in a different direction.
Natalie combines award-winning screen experience with practical conversations about resilience, inclusion, and communication. Her firsthand experience of public success, rejection, identity, and career change offers audiences practical perspectives grounded in real situations. Her stage presence keeps proceedings paced, warm and well-run from start to finish.
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frequently asked questions
Something we've not covered here?
Email natalie.gumede@getapeptalk.com or call PepTalk on +44 20 3835 2929 (UK) or +1 737 888 5112 (US), and one of our speaker agents will contact you within hours to confirm Natalie's availability and fees. If you can, please include your budget upfront – it helps us fast-track your request. It’s also helpful to know the date, format (virtual or in-person), location, and a bit about your audience.
Natalie Gumede draws on personal narrative from her two-decade career as a mixed-race, working-class actor, using her own experiences of rejection and adversity as the structural thread through her talks. She frames recurring professional setbacks as data points for self-reflection, inviting audiences to apply the same method of pattern recognition to their own working lives.
Natalie Gumede speaks on identity and belonging, diversity, equity and inclusion, and resilience through rejection. She is a three-time British Soap Award winner, recognised for Best Newcomer, Villain of the Year, and Best Dramatic Performance in her role as Kirsty Soames in Coronation Street.
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