Esu Ma'at

At thirteen, a flyer at his mother's job introduced Esu Ma'at to tennis — a game that would shape the next three decades of his life. What started with the Harlem Junior Tennis and Education Program became a college scholarship, Division I collegiate tennis, and certification as a PTR, USPTA, and USTA High-Performance coach. The USTA later featured his story nationally as part of its 50th-anniversary "NJTL 50 for 50" retrospective.

That foundation carried him into three decades of institutional leadership: directing High-Performance Development at a competitive tennis academy in New York City, leading diversity and inclusion initiatives for the United States Tennis Association, and ultimately serving as Chief Inclusion Officer for the Orlando Magic. He holds a Master's in Sports Management from Columbia University, where he now lectures — overseeing Supervised Research Projects in partnership with the Minnesota Timberwolves, the Chicago Sky, the Milwaukee Bucks, and Orlando City and Orlando Pride SC.

His work has earned the Orlando Business Journal's 2023 Outstanding Head of Diversity award, a spot on Orlando Magazine's "50 Most Powerful People — One to Watch," Onyx Magazine's Men of Honor award, and Orlando Family Magazine's 2025 Men of the Year honor. He's a member of the New York City Parks Hall of Fame, and the initiatives he led at the Orlando Magic earned the organization three separate institutional recognitions, including the 2023 African-American Chamber of Commerce Corporate Recognition Award.

Esu served as Class Chair for Leadership Orlando Class 101 — the largest and longest-running community leadership program in the nation — and has spoken at the SHRM HR Florida Conference, the Human Capital Forum, and the Global Women's Forum. He founded the Canvas Leadership Summit to test whether the pursuit of inner alignment would resonate beyond his own life. It did.

Outside of Canvas 360, Esu is the father of five daughters — the clearest proving ground, he says, for everything the Inside-Out Framework teaches. He studies wholistic health and martial arts as living practices in his own alignment, and he channels his resources toward causes close to him: homelessness, the arts, and education.