Jonna Mendez will be speaking at Dent 2020 in Santa Fe, NM (March 22-25). You can request an invitation here.
The theme of Dent 2020 is Reinvention.
That might mean reinventing your career, your product, your team, or your business model.
But with Former CIA Head of Disguise Jonna Mendez, the reinvention is literal: she disguised spies, making them nearly unrecognizable. We can’t wait to hear her ripped-from-the-blockbusters stories at Dent 2020 in Santa Fe, March 22-25 2020.

Jonna Mendez served in the CIA for over 25 years, rising to the position of Chief of Disguise, running a multi-million-dollar program with staff positioned all over the world. Her specialties were identity transformation, disguise, and clandestine photography (including spy gadgets like tiny cameras in pens!).
She and her husband (Antonio J. Mendez, also a CIA officer) have written three books together. First, Spy Dust about their work against the Soviets in Moscow during the last decade of the Cold War. They also wrote Argo, the true story of her husband’s rescue of six U.S. diplomats from Tehran (which was adapted into the 2013 Academy Award-Winning film). Most recently, they published The Moscow Rules also about their work in Moscow.
Jonna’s popcorn-worthy true stories have us ready to hear more at Dent 2020. Haven’t you always wanted to know the behind-the-scenes of spy work? Is it just like the movies? And can acting like a secret agent help me in my daily life?
First, In this TED talk, Jonna discusses the “Moscow Rules:” the key rules of espionage that you could implement in your personal or professional life:
- Trust your gut
- Don’t look back, you are never completely alone.
- Stay consistent over time.
- Know the opposition and their terrain intimately
- Pick the time and the place
- Keep your options open
- There is no limit to a human being’s ability to rationalize the truth.
Though these may seem like common sense, when you hear them described with life-and-death, global political stakes, you’ll see why they’re essential.
Second, In this video for Wired, she breaks down the (often fiendishly simple, but just as often elaborate) disguises she creates—altering everything from your mustache to your walk to how you use silver wear.
Finally, here she breaks down spy disguise scenes from 30 spy movies and shows. Haven’t you always wondered how realistic those are?
There are clearly a lot more stories where they came from and we’re on the edge of our seats to hear them at Dent 2020.