Theme: Challenge. Inspire. Create.

TEDxDrobetaTurnuSeverin is a one day conference always happening on the first Saturday of November. We aim to create a spark, to start interesting (and sometimes disturbing) conversations, to challenge the status quo, to bring together people who have a story to say with people who have an ear to understand.
The theme for this edition is Challenge. Inspire. Create. – and was selected as a way to bring you outside of your comfort zone, and invite you to look at different aspects of life from another perspective. We have also chosen a ‘line of direction’ for this edition: Made by hand. This edition will be focused on things and ideas made by hand, with the broad sense of having a personal touch and unique characteristics.

Palatul Culturii Teodor Costescu
Bd Carol I
Drobeta Turnu Severin, Mehedinți, 220111
Romania

Alex Puicea

Alex is part of that rare breed of DJs who don’t seek money, fame or groupies hanged on their shoulders while playing music. Their satisfaction comes mainly from the number of happy smiles they receive from the dance-floor and Alex knows just the perfect tunes to make that happen. His sound, warmed by some old skool house vibes or spiced with some obscure German deep house, managed to build up an enthusiastic community in his hometown, Drobeta Turnu Severin, and captured the attention of bigger crowds in Guesthouse or Studio Martin.

Andrei Avram

Lucky enough to have joined the scouts at an early age in his hometown of Alba Iulia, Andrei has been contributing to the development of the scout movement in Romania his entire adult life and is currently serving as the president of the National Organisation of Romanian Scouts. Yeti, as the scouts know him, draws strength from the belief that the scouting movement, if given enough momentum in Romania, has a good chance to push our society forward by empowering individuals to be happy and engaged in their own lives and in their communities.

Bogdan Grigore

Bogdan is a soft skills trainer and playful facilitator. One of his biggest passions is photography. With every shooting he discovers ways of bringing to light new views on the world and the beauty of the people around him. He focuses on portraits, street photography and artistic nudes. As a graduate of Psychology, Bogdan enjoys assisting others in exploring themselves, facing their fears and challenging their limits. He likes to challenge assumptions and prejudices associated with the controversial field of Artistic Nude photography.

Diana Moga

Diana Moga is a licensed chef and pastry-chef with a passion for healthy and tasty food. She began her career 6 years ago in Cluj-Napoca, working with raw foods, and quickly started delevoping her skills in the culinary field, creating sweet and savoury raw, vegan and vegetarian dishes. Since then, she has studied and practiced cooking on a daily basis, turning potentially boring ingredients into mouth-watering dishes. Diana believes that eating healthy foods should never have to mean sacrificing amazing tastes, textures or aspect, and during the talk, she will tell us how.

Florina Cîrlan

Tech and people enthusiast, Florina puts her love and passion for numbers at work in this data-driven world. From problem solving done through coding, she is currently devoted to aligning strategies and team’s missions. Passionately, making things happen for people and organizations.

Michael Marcondes de Freitas

Mika was born and raised in Brazil, formally educated in the US, awaken in Denmark, then re-educated on the Road. As a global citizen and global learner, Mika has a keen disregard for boundaries — institutional, disciplinary, social, whatever. He values experience and conversation. He has a PhD in Mathematics, and his education and professional experience add up to 14 years in the field. But Mika prefers to identify himself as an expert long-term budget traveler these days. He’s logged over 13,000 Km of overland travel by bicycle and at least another 17,000 Km hitchhiking across dozens of countries, in stretches of up to five months along the past two years. Inspired by the many different ways to live he observed on the road, Mika decided to leave academia. He’s now exploring the meaning of “success” and pushing the limits of what it might be possible to “achieve” in other dimensions. This is work in progress. In a world of increasing polarization and institutional distrust, Mika also wants to share his process challenging his most basic assumptions about the world and himself, and seeking to connect with his most basic needs — he believes that to be the foundation for productive dialog and stable change.

Mika Marcondes de Freitas

Mika has a Ph.D. in Mathematics, and his education and professional experience add up to 14 years in the field. But he prefers to identify himself as a long-term traveler and chronicler these days. In 2016, after completing his first postdoctoral assignment, Mika decided to take a more extended break before the next postdoc and embarked on a months-long journey by bicycle. He crossed various countries and relied greatly on the goodwill of strangers to get around, discovering a world of surprising encounters, touching stories, and weird adventures. Inspired by the many different ways to live he observed on the road, Mika decided to leave academia. He's now exploring the meaning of "success" and pushing the limits of what it might be possible to "achieve" in other dimensions. That is work in progress. Mika has so far logged over 13,000 km of overland travel by bicycle and at least another 17,000 km hitchhiking across dozens of countries, in stretches of up to five months along the past few years. He shares his impressions regularly on the Not Mad Yet blog and newsletter.

Mustafa Olabi

Mustafa flew Syria a couple of years ago, after his house was bombed, and the country became unstable and insecure. He arrived in Bucharest as a refugee just when Romanians started to look at war as an invasion of their territory.

Patrick Brăila

Patrick Brăila is a 33 year-old film director and trans activist born and raised in Drobeta Turnu Severin. In 2014, he publicly came out as a trans man and started building and working closely with the trans community in Romania, together with his best friend, Sasha Ichim. In 2015, he was a juror of Super! – the international film festival showing shorts made by teenagers, and the programmer of the Shorts Competition for Feminist and Queer International Film Festival. A year later, he directed and produced “Abreast”, a short autobiographical film, starring Maia Morgenstern, about the relationship between a trans man and his mother. The film premiered in the US and traveled around the world, in the US, Europe and Russia. He believes that mentalities can be challenged through honesty, storytelling and art and that a sense of belonging, expressed by kindness, is what can save the ship of humankind from sinking.

Shirina Ștefănescu Albu

Shirina is a Bucharest corporate and IP lawyer with an experience of over 10 years in the legal field. She has dedicated the last 4 years to the Legalway project, that helps entrepreneurs, mostly start-ups, to be aware and to prevent the main legal risks that can endanger their businesses. She is present in most of the main business incubators and accelerators in the country as a mentor and she aims to inspire what she calls ”legal thinking for entrepreneurs” or legal common sense in all start-ups so they have a better chance at survival on the market. A tech, history and arts enthusiast, her passion is to discover the hidden parts of things.