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In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized (subject to certain rules and regulations).

138 N Main Street
Dayton, Ohio, 45402
United States

DACA Tai Chi and Dance Group

DACA Tai Chi and Dance Group The Dayton Association of Chinese Americans Tai Chi and Dance Group is sponsored by DACA, with the mission of promoting Chinese culture and exchanging and sharing it with other ethnic groups. Tai Chi Fan dance is derived from a blend of Tai Chi sword, Kung Fu and other martial arts. Its vigorous and fast movements are fun to watch as performances, but also great as individual or group exercise routines.

The Human Race Theatre Company

The Human Race Theatre Co. is Dayton’s regional professional theater company, exploring the human experience and promoting enlightenment, inclusion and understanding through quality entertainment. The Dayton community has embraced The Human Race for 30 years because they tell the stories that reflect humanity. Their productions are more than just entertainment; they challenge thoughts and spark discussion. They open minds to new ideas, They engage on a very personal level, and they educate in a way that fulfills people’s lives.

World Jump Ropers

World Jump Rope Federation (WJRF) Is an international sports federation that exists to expand and unify competitive jump rope through our core principles of diversity, inclusion, innovation, promotion and the best practice of sport. WJRF produces and sanctions international and national championships. WJRF has 20 Country members spread over 3 continents. Our International Championships have been held in Washington DC (USA), Orlando Florida, Paris France, Braga Portugal with participants from over 27 countries over 4 continents. Performing at TEDxDayton are World Champion athletes from the USA, Mozambique and Hong Kong. You can learn more about WJRF by visiting worldjumprope.org

Brenden Wynn

Brenden Wynn is an operations manager at Providence Medical Group, Dayton’s largest multi-specialty physician group that is solely owned and operated by physicians. Over his past 10 years in the healthcare industry, Brenden has enjoyed opportunities in patient financial counseling, patient access management, and business development. Additionally, he is a certified Lean Six Sigma Blackbelt professional. Brenden is an active member of the Dayton LGBTQ community and serves as the co-chair of the Dayton Associate Board for Equitas Health, formerly AIDS Resource Center of Ohio. Brenden is a diehard Daytonian and a resident of St. Anne’s Hill Historic District. Prior to beginning his journey in healthcare, Brenden was a ballet dancer and is a graduate of Interlochen Arts Academy.

Cassie Guard

Cassie Guard, who also performs under the name “Champagne Shock,” started her burlesque career in 2006 with The Jigglewatts Burlesque based in Austin, Texas, and has performed all over the U.S. True love brought Cassie back to Ohio where she currently owns her own aerial fitness and dance studio called Femme Fatale Fitness. Teaching burlesque to the Dayton community really helped her understand how burlesque and other liberating "hobbies" can change a person's life. Cassie feels her greatest accomplishments thus far in life are never letting fear stop her from moving across country for love, owning her own business, being a mother, and receiving her bachelor's degree. Cassie plans to marry that person who brought her to Dayton, Jason Sprinkle.

Darren Kall

Darren Kall enjoys his work of taking technology beyond functionality to ensure it meets the goals of the people who use it. As a co-founder of Specific Clarity, he collaborates with technology and technology-enabled companies to build or improve the experience of products and services. Through Kall Consulting, Darren is a corporate event and conference speaker. Before co-founding Specific Clarity, Darren worked at Microsoft, AT&T Bell Laboratories, LexisNexis, and IBM. He has degrees from Dartmouth College and Rutgers College. He holds 11 U.S. patents, six international patents, and has 172 patent citations. Darren also likes being a husband, a dad, a beekeeper, and a sculptor and painter.

David Webb

Performing arts professional David Webb has been recognized for his commitment to empowering his community, his grassroots-organizing ability, his unbridled enthusiasm for all forms of music (especially funk), and his dedication to recognizing funk musicians and enthusiasts around the world. He is proficient at building strategic partnerships with key individuals in the community and is an unflagging cheerleader for recognizing all of the “firsts” that have originated in Dayton. His dream of providing music history to youth, while drawing visitors to Dayton from around the world, is being realized through TheFunkCenter. David’s career encompasses 40 years of serving as a studio musician, radio personality, executive producer for record companies, and executive producer of three television shows.

Deanna Murphy

Deanna Murphy is a Miami Valley native and a graduate of Wright State University. Along with being a former teacher and a stay-at-home mother to three beautiful children, Deanna is the co-founder of Brigid’s Path, Ohio’s first newborn recovery center that provides care, compassion, and guidance to babies and families suffering from the disease of addiction. Driven by her own experiences as the daughter of two addicts, Deanna joined an inspired friend and together they started this nonprofit organization to help those affected by the overwhelming drug epidemic in our community. When she’s not advocating for others or serving as classroom mom, Deanna can be found winning a game of Scrabble against her husband, Andy.

Heidi Landes

Heidi Landes is a parent coach who started a coaching business called Courage for Parents with her husband, Gabe. Their mission is to help parents prepare their children for life. They also serve as a host family for medical mission children from Africa and travel with their family to Mexico several times a year to volunteer at an orphanage. Heidi received an undergraduate degree from Miami University and a MBA from the University of Dayton. Early in her career, she founded TeenWorks, Inc., a faith-based nonprofit that taught entrepreneurialism to youth, and served on the board of Her Star Scholars, an organization that sends young girls to school in underdeveloped countries. Heidi and her husband live in Dayton with their four children.

Jo'el Thomas-Jones

Jo’el Thomas-Jones is a native Daytonian who has had the opportunity to live outside of Ohio and travel extensively abroad. Those experiences have led her back to Dayton. Since returning, Jo’el has been an active member of the community: She is a key organizer in the Dayton Peace Bridge March and a coordinator for Montgomery County veterans. As a part of the Dayton League of Women Voters, she hosted a town hall on campaign finance reform. While researching race and settlement in Dayton, she wrote and produced a documentary on race relations. Jo’el’s motto is “all life has value,” which has defined her work in Neighborhoods Over Politics, a nonprofit whose mission is to end disinvestment and deplorable conditions in underserved neighborhoods.

Joe Deer

Joe Deer is a distinguished professor of musical theatre and director of the musical theatre initiative at Wright State University. He is an award-winning, internationally recognized teacher, director and author, working with many of the top theater training programs in the world, as well as with Dayton’s Muse Machine and The Human Race Theatre Co. (with whom he is a proud resident artist). Joe is a veteran Broadway dancer, actor and stage manager. He is also the author of Acting in Musical Theatre (co-author, Rocco Dal Vera) and Directing in Musical Theatre. He is married to actress Caitlin Larsen and father to their son, Leo.

Jonah Yokoyama

Jonah Yokoyama is the Executive Director of Heartland Trans Wellness Group. He is a registered nurse, artist, gamer, nature-lover, all-around geek, and a transgender man. Born and raised in Texas, he has lived in Cincinnati with his wife Laurie for over a decade. Jonah is passionate about helping trans people access community and culturally competent medical and behavioral health care. He is an experienced educator, regularly training providers on how to best serve trans populations at many organizations. At Heartland, he runs an LGBT center with a focus on providing services to the transgender community including support groups, workshops, and crisis services.  In addition to his contributions to Heartland, Jonah works as a nurse at a pediatric inpatient mental health center.

Lance Salyers

Lance Salyers currently serves as a corporate executive with LexisNexis after a successful first career as a criminal prosecutor. In addition to his day job, Lance puts his passion and creativity to work writing about the fundamentals of great leadership on his blog, Leading With IDEAS: Integrity | Discipline | Excellence | Accountability | Simplicity. With 21 years of marriage behind them, Lance and his wife, Amber, have an 11-year-old daughter who hopes someday to be a horseback-riding artist, and an eight-year-old son who aspires to be a car-designing ninja warrior.

Linda Jones

Linda Jones is a self-proclaimed obsessive organizer of people, places, things and events, and often incorporates this passion into her personal and professional life. She serves her community in a variety of ways, including acting as chairperson for The Ohio Sauerkraut Festival, recognized as one of the top festivals in the nation. Linda is the vice president of finance and administration for Software Solutions Inc. in Lebanon, Ohio. She has been recognized as one of Miami Valley’s 40 Under 40 by the Dayton Business Journal, Citizen of the Year in Waynesville, Ohio, Employee of the Year by the OH/KY Chapter of the National Employee Stock Ownership Plan Association, and one of Miami Valley’s Women to Watch by the Dayton Better Business Bureau’s Women in Business Networking.

Moriba Jah

Dr. Moriba Jah is the director of the University of Arizona’s Space Object Behavioral Sciences with applications to space domain awareness, space protection, space traffic monitoring, planetary defense, and space debris research. He received his bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Prescott, Arizona, and his master’s and doctorate in aerospace engineering sciences from the University of Colorado at Boulder, specializing in astrodynamics and statistical orbit determination. Before joining the University of Arizona, Moriba was the space situational awareness mission lead for the Air Force Research Laboratory, and a spacecraft navigator for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory serving on a number of Mars missions.

Neenah Ellis

Neenah Ellis is the general manager of public radio station WYSO 91.3 FM in Yellow Springs. At WYSO, she has created “Community Voices,” a unique radio production training project that has transformed the station. Community producers at WYSO have won several state and national awards for their work alongside WYSO news staff. In the 1980s and ’90s, Neenah was a writer and editor for NPR’s All Things Considered, among other programs, and won the Alfred I. duPont/Columbia University Award and three George Foster Peabody Awards for her work. She is the author of If I Live to be 100: Lessons from the Centenarians, a New York Times best-seller. She lives today in Yellow Springs with her husband, Noah Adams, an NPR correspondent and author.

Robert Owens

Robert Owens understands first-hand the powerful impact that outreach and student-services programs can have on youth. With a background in special education, Robert has steered his organization, Signature Educational Solutions, toward community collaboration by supplementing curriculum with after-school programs and partnerships with area nonprofits. As an educator, Robert taught for seven years, and worked with at-risk youth in corrections, treatment, and chemical dependency for 12 years. Robert also holds a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction with more than 10 years of experience as a trained facilitator.

Ryan Ireland

Library advocate Ryan Ireland lives a life surrounded by the written word. In May of this year, he earned a Ph.D. in English from Miami University. His dissertation work focused on the history of public libraries and how they establish cultural memories. He currently works as the publicity and marketing coordinator for the Greene County Public Library. In addition to writing articles on librarianship for Voice of Youth Advocates and Public Libraries Quarterly, Ryan has published two novels, Beyond the Horizon and Ghosts of the Desert. He currently sits on the board of the Antioch Writers Workshop and is drafting a nonfiction book based on his dissertation research.

Salma Albezreh

Salma Albezreh is an American Muslim writer of spoken word poetry. Her topics vary from Islamophobia and the American identity to human trafficking and women's rights. She works to fight stereotypes that are especially evident in schools as well as to empower youth to take leadership roles in making a change in their society. Salma is the co-founder of MYSA, an association that provides youth with service opportunities. She is also helping to establish an initiative to empower youth from different religious backgrounds to interact at a retreat and training program where they can showcase their talents across the country and promote tolerance. Salma is a proud Daytonian who was born in Boston. She is 13 years old.

Scot Ganow

Scot is an attorney at Faruki Ireland & Cox P.L.L., where his practice focuses on privacy law. A former corporate chief privacy officer, Scot holds the Certified Information Privacy Professional certification and teaches privacy law at the University of Dayton. Scot speaks extensively on privacy, security and de-identification, including the International Association of Privacy Professionals' Global Data Privacy Summit and later this year at the Privacy + Security Forum in Washington, D.C. Scot volunteers in Dayton with The Victory Project, for which he is also outside counsel. Scot served as an enlisted soldier and officer in the Army National Guard and officiates football at the high school and collegiate levels. Most importantly, Scot is the proud father of two great kids.

Tess Cortés

Tess Cortés is a digital media artist, curator, and Gallery Coordinator for Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. Her work has been exhibited and screened nationally and internationally including at the Riffe Gallery in Ohio, Bedford Gallery in California, and VIP Art Gallery in Serbia. She received an MFA in Electronic Art from the University of Cincinnati and a BFA in Painting from Wright State University.

Tony Hall

Thrice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, Ambassador Tony Hall is a leading advocate for global hunger relief programs and improving human rights. He currently serves as executive director emeritus of the Alliance to End Hunger, through which he meets regularly with members of Congress to encourage them to become more actively engaged on hunger issues. He also leads the Hall Hunger Initiative in Dayton. Ambassador Hall served as the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Agencies for Food and Agriculture in Rome, Italy. Prior to this, he represented the Third District of Ohio in the U.S. Congress for 24 years where he authored legislation that supported food aid, child survival, and basic education in the world’s poorest countries.

Tyler Back

Tyler Back is one of those wild-eyed, mile-a-minute, soul-on-his-sleeve individuals you never forget meeting. He’s also one of the rare company heads who whole-heartedly personifies his company’s spirit and mission. Determined to shake up everyone in the digital landscape, Tyler is constantly invigorating his strategic brain for the good of clients and for goodness’ sake. Tyler is the principal director at Mitosis, an international award-winning digital experience company, as well as co-founder and acting CEO of Meiosis, a data-agnostic software-as-a-service marketing automation company determined to transform marketing technology and analytics.