Alfonso Montuori is Professor in the Transformative Inquiry Department at California Institute of Integral Studies. A graduate of the University of London, he is the author of several books and numerous articles on creativity, transdisciplinarity, complexity, the future, culture, social change, leadership, and education. His work has been translated in Italian, French, Spanish, and Chinese.

Alfonso's books include Evolutionary Competence (Gieben, 1989); From Power to Partnership (co-authored with Isabella Conti, Harper San Francisco, 1993);  Creators on Creating (co-edited with Barron & Barron, Putnam, 1997); and Social Creativity, vols. 1-2 (co-edited with Ronald E. Purser, Hampton Press, 1999), Journeys in Complexity (Routledge, 2015),  and most recently with Gabrielle Donnelly The Routledge International Handbook for Creative Futures (2022). In 2006 Alfonso became a San Francisco Library Laureate.

Alfonso has contributed articles in publications such as Academy of Management Review, Futures, Human Relations, Journal of Management Education, and the Journal of Humanistic Psychology.

In 2003-2004,  Alfonso was Wiepking Distinguished Professor in the Fine Arts department at Miami University in Oxford Ohio, and in 2018 Distinguished Visiting Professor at Sapienza University of Rome. Alfonso has also taught at the College of Notre Dame, the Saybrook Institute, and in 1985-1986 in the Management Department at South-Central University in Changsha, Hunan Province, in the People's Republic of China, where he developed and taught the first courses in management and organization theory.

Alfonso is Co-Editor of World Futures: The Journal of New Paradigm Research, and on the editorial board of numerous academic journals. He was the founder and General Editor of Advances in Systems Theory, Complexity, and the Human Sciences at Hampton Press, which published important works by Gregory Bateson, Gianluca Bocchi & Mauro Ceruti, Edgar Morin, Ervin Laszlo, and others.

Alfonso has consulted on leadership development, creativity, and innovation with numerous international corporations, including NetApp, UCB (Belgium) U.S. Forest Service, Procter & Gamble, Training Vision (Singapore), Pacific Bell, Stentor Group (Canada), Climate XChange, Kaiser Permanente, Interstate Insurance, Omnitel-Olivetti (Italy), ENEL (Italy), U.S. Department of Labor, University of Missouri Kansas City, Progressive Insurance, and others.

Alfonso was born in Holland, and grew up in Lebanon, Greece, and England before coming to the United States in 1983. His father was Italian and his mother Dutch, and Alfonso spoke several languages from an early age. He picked up English, his 4th language, at age 12 when his family moved to London.  In London Alfonso worked as an interpreter for Scotland Yard and mainly as a professional musician on saxophone and flute, making numerous recordings with his own band and as a session-man, as well as  gigging extensively throughout England for several years. Over the years he has performed with or produced artists including Roy Hargrove, Joe Henderson, Joe Louis Walker, Charles Brown, and Aztec Camera and collaborates with his wife, the jazz singer Kitty Margolis, playing the saxophone in her band and as co-producer of her award-winning recordings.