Theme: Journey

www.tedxbrno.cz

Zelný trh 2
Brno, Brno-město, 602 00
Czech Republic

ÚstaF

ÚstaF is an amateur theatre group from Brno. Since it was founded in 1997, it has been refining the “voiceband” creative method, a distinctive form of choral recitation created by the avant-garde Czech dramatist E. F. Burian in the 1920s. ÚstaF combines music, the art of recitation and theatre. It works with Dadaistic playfulness, fantasy and spontaneity. Over the years about 50 individuals have been members of the group; at the present time it brings together 28 men and women and is led by the director and dramaturge Zdeněk Šturma. ÚstaF has appeared with great success at such festivals as Wolker's Prostějov, Šrámek's Písek and Jirásek's Hronov. The group has also performed at the Magnesia Litera book awards and it cooperates regularly with the HaDivadlo theatre in Brno.

Barbora Zuchová

Barbora Zuchová took a bit of a detour before reaching her dream job as an Emergency Medical Service doctor. She first graduated from the Dance Conservatory in Brno, and then went on to study at both the Faculty of Sports Studies and the Faculty of Medicine of Masaryk University. She entered the Faculty of Medicine already convinced she wanted to become an emergency service doctor, and has devoted her life to this field. While still a student of medicine she worked as an Emergency Medical Service spokesperson, trying to improve the media image of this Cinderella among the components of the Integrated Emergency System. She now works as a doctor for the Emergency Medical Service, which has always been something close to her heart. She is also involved in educating the public in providing non-professional first aid.

Beata Bocek

Beata Bocek is a self-taught Czech-Polish musician who plays and sings her own works. What she lacks in technique she makes up for with emotion, earthiness and open-heartedness. She has been pursuing music since her childhood, when she used to write her own lyrics to famous melodies and accompany herself on the piano. At the age of 14 she discovered the accordion and guitar and started composing. She studied special pedagogy and worked in the field for seven years, until 2013. After a year spent travelling in New Zealand and other countries she decided to focus solely on being a singer-songwriter. She has released several records, the most popular of which, Ja tutaj mieszkam, was nominated for the Anděl music award. She performs both solo and backed by other musicians. For several years she was a singer with the Casually and Lying Down band. She is also the founder of the More Than a Year music project.

Břetislav Svozil

Břetislav Svozil is a geographer, ethnographer and educator and headmaster of the primary school in Deblín, 20 kilometres northwest of Brno, where they develop place-based learning, i.e. education linked to place, with an emphasis on ecological, social and economic topics. For a long time he has been engaged in education, sustainability, security and transdisciplinary community research. He has made several research trips to Siberia, Central Asia and islands in the Caspian Sea. He draws on his experience in his work with communities. He cooperates with several Czech and foreign universities and NGOs. He is the author of several books and many articles and regularly presents his vision of learning for the future.

Hana Šindlerová

Hana Šindlerová studied foreign trade. Because foreign languages and travelling are her passion she went to study abroad, where she subsequently lived and worked in the field of tourism for almost 20 years. She travelled throughout Europe, Asia and Africa; now she is planning a culinary tour to China. She came back to the Czech Republic five years ago in a difficult situation after her partner abandoned her when she was pregnant. Her sad life story, disappointment at the quality of groceries sold in Czech shops and love of cooking led her to enter the jam market. She founded the first “marmeládovna” (jam shop) in Prague. She is a small businesswoman but her firm's turnover is growing by 30% annually while remaining 100% based on manual labour. She lives in Prague with her 5-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son.

Jason Manion

Jason Manion is an Experience Architect. Over the years he has worked with national and international companies and organizations such as Microsoft, AT&T, Facebook, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Participant Media, etc. to build strategies on how to engage youth in their futures. He leans on his experience as a documentarian where he travelled across the United States multiple times capturing stories of success from leaders from all different walks of life for the PBS series Roadtrip Nation as well as visiting, learning from, and presenting at over 400+ high schools, colleges, and education conferences. His goal is to create experiences that both inspire and make an impact. He lives in California.

Jiří Kůs

Jiří Kůs popularizes nanotechnology and the concept of the Third Industrial Revolution (proposed by the American economist Jeremy Rifkin) in the Czech Republic. He says about himself that he is guided by intuition in life and that he seeks linkages and good form. He is a technician who overlaps with the humanities, a visionary and idealist who sometimes writes poetry and has a rock guitar leaning up against his computer. He studied industrial energetics and later sociology and psychology. For over twenty years he worked in industrial automation as Commercial Director of a Czech-Italian firm. He co-founded the nanoSPACE company and is Chairman of the Czech Nanotechnology Industries Association, whose establishment he initiated. His vision is that of a world where energy has ceased to be an interesting commodity, there are self-driven electromobiles in the streets and people’s health is monitored by nanosensors.

Josef Kordík

Josef Kordík is a Roman Catholic priest who has been working in the parish of Železnice since 1989. He also served as a prison chaplain in Valdice for 23 years. Following his signing of Charter 77 his permission to serve as a priest was revoked by the state and he worked as a locksmith and cabinetmaker. Given a suspended prison sentence by the Communist regime, he devoted his time to self-help efforts to repair decaying churches and took an active part in dissident activities. He circulated samizdat and transcribed Radio Free Europe broadcast and his presbytery in Libčeves became a gathering spot in the country for the underground. He wrote A Book that Need Not Exist about a series of Secret Police interrogations. In his spare time he likes to go on pilgrimages; for example, he walked 3,000 kilometres to Santiago de Compostela and over 1,000 kilometres to Rome.

Ladislav Kabelka

Ladislav Kabelka specializes in geriatrics, palliative medicine and pain treatment. Recently he became Senior Consultant at the Department of Long-Term Care at the Hospital of the Order of the Brothers Hospitallers in Brno. Before that, he worked at St. Joseph’s hospice and pain centre in Rajhrad for twelve years. Hospice palliative care has taught him to perceive illness as part of life and to try to help not only with medication but also by investigating the connections between the individual’s illness and his or her life. He claims that contemporary health care does not know how to support living with illness, and instead offers expensive suffering. He is Chairman of the Czech Society for Palliative Medicine and is also a member of the board of the Czech Society of Gerontology and Geriatrics. He lectures at the Faculty of Medicine of Masaryk University. He lives in Brno and is married with three daughters. He likes folk music and opera, spending time at his cottage and hiking.

Margareta Křížová

Margareta Křížová is one of the founding partners of the multidisciplinary law firm and business advisory group CEAG. She is primarily responsible for strategy and business development. She graduated from the School of International and Public Relations in Prague and holds an Executive MBA from the ESCEM School of Business and Management at the University of New York in Prague. She is active on the Czech startup scene as a mentor and on occasion invests time in new enterprises. She writes for Hospodářské noviny, MfD, Profit and other business publications. She was one of the investors in the Czech version of Dragons’ Den, aired by Czech TV. After more than twenty years in business, she still gets infuriated by arrogance and the loss of common sense. She likes small businesses, including village hairdresser's shops and corner shops.

Marie Stará

Marie Stará is a dressmaker, car mechanic, fashion designer and founder of the Rodná Hrouda clothing brand. The first half of her life, affected by the loss of her mother at the age of 8, was a period of discovery, both of herself and of the meaning of life. She grew up feeling that life was difficult and love had to be deserved. She worked for the Škoda company in Mladá Boleslav on the assembly line for 11 years, repaired cars and finally sold new ones. The turning point in her life came with the founding of Rodná Hrouda in Poděbrady and the beginning of a journey to fulfil her long-time dream. She has come to know where she belongs and has her own family and a fulfilling job. She is returning to one of the time-honoured crafts of our ancestors and reviving Czech folklore – for example, she created the national costumes for the Czech Miss beauty pageant.

Martin Kratochvíl

Martin Kratochvíl is a musician, traveller, mountaineer, entrepreneur, cameraman and director. He graduated from the Berklee College of Music in Boston and also has a doctorate in philosophy and psychology. He is a renowned jazzman and leader of the Jazz Q band. He has composed music for fifteen full-length films and about 500 documentaries. After 1989 he produced Tankový prapor, the first film after the fall of Communism to be financed with private money. A year before the Velvet Revolution he founded the Bonton publishing company, which achieved the dominant market position in the entertainment field; this he sold in 2011. Now he performs in concerts, composes music and makes travel documentaries and TV series about Eastern religion and the Himalayas – he climbed the 8,000-metre-high Shishapangma with a camera. He is also a member of the Supervisory Board of the antidrug foundation Drop In.

Martin Pavliš

Martin Pavliš studies at the University of Economics, Prague; he is a scout and a traveller. He has visited Malaysia, Singapore, Brazil, Argentina and the USA, where he attended local conferences, met interesting people, broadened his horizons and gained a different perspective in terms of looking at the world. His most recent journey took him to the Russian Federation for almost two months. He got to about 40 kilometres from the Ukrainian town of Novoazovsk on the Azov Sea, where a military conflict was taking place. The journey changed his views on current world affairs and made him think harder about propaganda and the manipulation of people.

Petr Váša

Petr Váša is a physical poet. He himself invented this genre, in which literary, musical, motor and artistic inspiration is expressed by a single performer through the sole use of voice and body and, in some cases, a unique style of drawing. For more than 20 years he has been running courses and workshops of physical poetry as an original pedagogical method of self-discovery. The main inspirational sources of physical poetry include, besides everyday life, art history, religious studies, psychology and biology. He also works as a writer, composer, performer and graphic artist. From the age of 15 he has been participating in various music groups – composing music, writing lyrics, playing the guitar and singing. In 2000 he founded the Ty Syčáci band, with which he has created two albums of songs and two experimental operas. Occasionally he lectures at the Brno University of Technology’s Faculty of Fine Arts as well as at the Janáček Academy of Music and the Performing Arts.

Šimon Pánek

Šimon Pánek is the Director and cofounder of the People in Need humanitarian organization. In addition to relief aid, this NGO, one of the largest in Central Europe, focuses on development cooperation and on the promotion of human rights and democracy in foreign countries, as well as on educational programmes for minorities in the Czech Republic. He has been personally involved in humanitarian crises in Somalia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Chechnya, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Haiti. In 1989 he was one of the most active student leaders in the Velvet Revolution, and later worked for Václav Havel's Presidential Office in the Department of Foreign Policy. He is a member of the think-tank European Council on Foreign Relations. He lives in Prague with his partner and two daughters.