With nearly two decades of experience in high-fashion and editorial beauty, Fennell has built a career around the power of images to shape identity, influence culture, and expand possibility. Her transition from traditional beauty image-making into emerging technologies reflects an ongoing commitment to experimentation, creative reinvention, and exploring new forms of visual expression.

Today, her practice spans AI-assisted art, experimental film, photography, creative direction, and speculative storytelling. Her artistic work explores beauty, transformation, consciousness, and the relationship between the physical and imagined worlds, often centering Black women within surreal environments that challenge familiar perceptions of reality.

Fennell is the founder of The Future in Black™, a cultural intelligence studio where imagination, play, and storytelling shape what comes next. Through conversations, workshops, and cultural experiences, the studio explores how creativity and emerging technologies can help people imagine and build more expansive futures.

As a speaker, Fennell brings together her experience in beauty, artistic practice, and creative leadership to examine the evolving relationship between human imagination and artificial intelligence. Her talks explore beauty in the age of AI, creative direction, cultural intelligence, and the importance of curiosity and play in shaping new possibilities.

Her speaking experience includes Adobe, Kering, Samsung, Sundance Film Festival, L'Oréal Luxe/Fashion Group International, Wharton, NYU, Parsons, and The New School.

Fennell is an Adobe Firefly and Express Ambassador, OpenAI Artist, and Runway Creative Partner.

Across her artistic and professional work, Fennell is interested in a central question: What becomes possible when we allow imagination to move beyond the boundaries of what we already know?

Joy is represented by the Museum of Artificial Art (MoAA).