amy esselman, data storyteller

Specific focus areas: helping people communicate data with clarity and confidence through interactive client workshops and the 8-week online course

Promotional materials

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Social media:  LinkedIn
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In their own words…

Where are you from?
I was raised on a small hobby farm in central Minnesota, went to graduate school in England, and now live in Austin, Texas, with my husband, two daughters, and our rescue dog.

Do you have a favorite chart type?
I like bar graphs because they are so familiar and easy to read. They are a great choice when working with categorical data and offer flexibility for grouping, ordering, and orienting information.

What inspired your interest in visualization?
I have a quantitative background and have always appreciated how visualization helps to discover patterns in data that can answer questions and help solve problems. Summarizing information visually also makes it more accessible to others to learn and understand.

How do you spend your time outside of work?
I love being outdoors and spending time with my family and friends. One reason I’ve enjoyed leading my daughters’ Girl Scout troop for the past decade is that it combines both. I also stay busy teaching university students how to communicate data effectively. Lately, much of my free time has gone into do-it-yourself home improvement projects: updating tile, replacing light fixtures, painting, and reworking our landscaping to better handle Austin’s unpredictable climate.

from dashboard to story

Dashboard interactivity makes data discovery much easier, but to drive meaningful change, it is usually more effective to craft a separate presentation specific to the story we want to tell. Creating a presentation tailored to our audience lets us deliver our findings in a way that will resonate with them and frees us from having to compete for attention with unrelated charts, filters, and text.

bar charts and dot plots and line graphs, oh my!

You can help your audience understand the key takeaways more quickly and easily by considering how you arrange and emphasize your data. In this transformation, we take intentional steps to understand the context, reduce the effort to interpret the graph, arrange information intuitively, and emphasize data thoughtfully.

is your point clear?

When you fail to explicitly state the purpose of your communication, you run the risk of the important insight being lost, or someone arriving at the wrong conclusion. When you explicitly include your takeaways and your recommendations in your slides, your audience doesn’t have to guess what they’re seeing. When words and pictures support one another, it is an extremely powerful combination—not only to increase understanding, but also to elevate the likelihood that your audience will remember, and be able to recall, the message you deliver.

episode 101
how to teach data storytelling

Amy and members of the storytelling with data university instructor community discuss how they help students move beyond analyzing data to communicating it clearly. You'll hear practical teaching strategies, including hands-on critique, real-world datasets, audience-centered assignments, and thoughtful conversations about the role of AI in the classroom.

Simon and Amy tackle common presentation challenges submitted by subscribers to the storytelling with data YouTube channel. They cover how to turn complex analysis into a clear and engaging story, why storyboarding can help you structure your message before jumping into slides, and how to decide what to include—and what to leave out—when your analysis contains more detail than your audience needs.

episode 97
delivering business value

Amy talks with Shahar Meir, a data executive with more than 20 years of experience leading data teams at companies including Meta and PayPal. Together, they explore what it really takes for data professionals to move beyond producing dashboards and reports to driving meaningful business outcomes.