Theme: Connection

The theme of this year’s TEDxAmoskeagMillyard is “Connection.” From our deepening understanding of the world’s interdependent ecosystems to an appreciation of the potential of intellectual and artistic collaboration, we’ll explore what happens when we connect: with people, with place, with ideas, or with beauty. If the Renaissance showed us the importance of the individual, our modern world highlights the importance of connection.

2500 N River Road
Hooksett, New Hampshire, 03106
United States

Davis and Deleault

Davis and Deleault's music has touched audiences across the globe ranging from individual tours of the U.S. and Europe to sharing the stage with multi-Grammy winning artists at festival venues including the JVC, Montreal, Kool, Berlin, and many others. The duo's recording credits include The Microscopic Septet, LL Cool J, Jon Bon Jovi, Mighty Sam McClain, CJ Chenier, Danzig, Tribute to Monk, and many others.

Saint Michael’s College Acabellas

The Acabellas are the only all-female a capella group from Saint Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont. Formed in 2009, the Acabellas perform locally and on campus throughout the academic year, with new ‘Bellas joining the ranks each year. Performing covers of songs such as “One More Night” by Maroon 5 and “The Chain” by Ingrid Michaelson, the 18-member a cappella group comes together to create beautiful harmonies and entertain with their charisma and charm. Learn more at http://smc-acabellas.blogspot.com/.

Amanda Grappone Osmer

Amanda Grappone Osmer is the owner of the Grappone Automotive Group, a family-owned car company founded in 1924 when her great-grandparents Rocco and Emmanuella Grappone bought a Gulf service station in Concord, New Hampshire. She first started working in the family business at 16 years old, cleaning engine parts, filing, delivering mail, and changing oil. But she didn’t expect to stay in the business, and after college worked for many years for Outward Bound. In 2003, she returned to New Hampshire to help her parents transition into retirement, and took over as owner in 2007. Since then, she has applied a philosophy adapted from Outward Bound to a place most people wouldn’t expect: selling cars.

Deepika Kurup

An advocate for clean water since she was in elementary school, Deepika Kurup was recognized as “America’s Top Young Scientist” in 2012, winning the grand prize in the Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge for creating a sustainable, cost-effective water-purification system that uses solar energy to disinfect contaminated water. She has presented her research at schools and events worldwide, including the 2013 White House Science Fair, and has been featured in national and international media. Kurup was honored with the President’s Environmental Youth Award for her environmental stewardship by the United States Environmental Protection Agency. More recently, she won the national 2014 Stockholm Junior Water Prize, and represented the U.S. at the international competition in Stockholm, Sweden, during World Water Week—the most prestigious youth award for a water-related science project.

Emilie Aries

Emilie Aries is the founder and CEO of Bossed Up, a personal and professional training organization that helps women navigate career transition, prevent burnout, and craft sustainable careers. A former political digital strategist and grassroots organizer, she was the Rhode Island state director for Organizing for America, and managed digital strategy for the Senate Democratic Super PAC. Based in Washington, DC, Aries is a regular contributor writing on gender roles and workplace culture at RoleReboot.org, The Huffington Post, and the Levo League.

Howard Mansfield

Writing about preservation, architecture and American history, Howard Mansfield has contributed to The New York Times, American Heritage, The Washington Post, Historic Preservation, Yankee and other publications. Mansfield has explored issues of preservation in six books, including “In the Memory House” and “The Same Ax, Twice.” Writer and critic Guy Davenport said of Mansfield, “Howard Mansfield has never written an uninteresting or dull sentence. All of his books are emotionally and intellectually nourishing …. He is something like a cultural psychologist along with being a first-class cultural historian. He is humane, witty, bright-minded, and rigorously intelligent. His deep subject is Time: how we deal with it and how it deals with us.”

Jessica Higgins

While many of her high school classmates were visiting colleges during the summer of their junior year, 17-year-old Jessica Higgins began U.S. Army basic training, in preparation to serve her country upon graduation the following spring. She was deployed to Iraq at 19, in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom III, and spent a year hauling fuel, hazardous material and ammunition around the country, as well providing convoy security and assisting on civil affairs missions. Throughout her eight years in the Army, Higgins served four in active duty and four in the reserves, as a motor transport operator, chemical operations specialist and a recruiter. An advocate for veterans both personally and professionally, Higgins served as a military advisor for Southern New Hampshire University for more than three years and is currently the assistant director of military benefits for the university.

Joel Christian Gill

The Chicago Tribune describes Joel Christian Gill’s work as “black history as you’ve never seen it before.” An instructor and the associate dean of student affairs at the New Hampshire Institute of Art in Manchester, N.H., Gill’s artistic background includes painting, printmaking, and illustration, but it is his graphic novels and visual storytelling that have established him as an important voice in American art. In his books, “Strange Fruit, Volume 1: Uncelebrated Narratives from Black History,” and “Bass Reeves: Tales of the Talented Tenth,” Gill applies a fresh artistic perspective to tell stories of African-Americans that the history books have largely forgotten.

Loretta Brady

Dr. Loretta L.C. Brady is a professor of psychology at St. Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire, with a research focus on risk and resilience. She is also the founder of BDS Insight, a firm that helps companies and organizations improve effectiveness through evidence-based leader training; and the co-author of “A Seat at the Table,” a monthly column on diversity and inclusion in the New Hampshire Business Review. In 2013, she completed a J. William Fulbright Fellowship, which included a summer study abroad, doing research and practical work in Nicosia, Cyprus. While there, Brady helped improve the capacity of that island nation’s substance abuse system across a broad array of service sectors.

Louise Pascale

In the 1960s, Louise Pascale was a Peace Corps volunteer in Kabul, Afghanistan. Working with Afghan poets and musicians, she created a children’s songbook, meant to be shared with schools in Kabul. Traveling throughout the country, Pascale taught the songs to school children and encouraged them to draw pictures for each song. The book was published in 1968, with the children’s illustrations alongside. Decades later Pascale came across her dog-eared copy of the songbook and realized that years of unrest in Afghanistan probably meant her book was the only copy left. Knowing how vital the songs were to the Afghan culture, she vowed to return the songs to the people of Afghanistan. Thus, Pascale became the founder and director of the Afghan Children’s Songbook project, an initiative that strives to preserve and redistribute traditional Afghan children’s songs that were almost completely eradicated due to the devastation and music censorship that afflicted Afghanistan for almost 30 years.

Manuel Hernandez Carmona

Early in his career as an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher in New York City, Manuel Hernández Carmona had many students recently arrived from Latin American countries. He was tasked to teach these 10th graders, many who had been in the U.S. less than two years, the works of Hemingway, Poe and Shakespeare – and was excited to do it. But “after an intensive month of ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ I quickly understood that I had a major predicament on my hands.” The problem was not the students’ desire to learn, but rather that, “Try as they might, my students continued to struggle with the plight of the star-crossed lovers, because their own social, cultural and personal backgrounds were so far removed from the lives of the Montagues and Capulets of Verona.” Determined to bridge that gap, Hernández Carmona discovered the power of Latino/a literature, which constructed bridges of understanding to teach his students to learn English, to read, stay in school and pass citywide Regents exams.

Randy Pierce

In 1989, Randy Pierce was a 22-year-old recently graduated from college, embarking on a career as a hardware design engineer. Then suddenly, over a two-week period, he lost all of the vision in his right eye and half of the vision in his left eye to a devastating neurological disease. Over the next 11 years, he lost what remaining sight he had. When he was 39, the disorder attacked again, leaving him in a wheelchair. For nearly two years, he battled his way out of the chair and back on his feet once again. When he did, he set a new goal: to climb all 48 of New Hampshire’s 4,000-foot White Mountain peaks in a ten-year period. Two years later, he accomplished all 48 peaks in a single winter season. Today, Pierce is the founder and president of 2020 Vision Quest, a non-profit organization that leads and inspires students and professionals to reach beyond adversity and achieve their peak potential.

Robin Starr

Richmond, Virginia, is distinguished as one of the safest cities in the country for homeless animals, thanks in large part to with Robin Starr, CEO of the Richmond SPCA, recognized in 2014 as one of the “10 Amazing No-Kill Animal Shelters in the U.S.” by One Green Planet. A former attorney and Richmond SPCA board member, Starr took over as the organization’s CEO in 1997. She has lectured nationally on animal welfare and non-profit management topics, and in 2014 was named one of Virginia’s Most Influential Women by Virginia Lawyers Weekly.

Tania Simoncelli

Tania Simoncelli is Assistant Director for Forensic Science and Biomedical Information in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. She previously worked for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, where she served as Senior Advisor in the Office of Medical Products and Tobacco. From 2003-2010, Simoncelli worked as the Science Advisor to the ACLU, where she guided the organization’s responses to cutting-edge developments in science and technology that pose challenges for civil liberties. In 2013, Simoncelli was named by the journal Nature as one of “ten people who mattered this year” for her work with the ACLU in overturning gene patents.