Theme: 10th Anniversary

For ten years, TEDxSMU has brought new and inspiring ideas from all across the world to the heart of Dallas. Join us in 2020 for our 10th anniversary celebration filled with speakers from past years and an exciting new lineup of talks designed to inspire you.

We'll kick off on Thursday, March 5th with an opening session celebrating the past decade of TEDxSMU, and continue into Friday, March 6th with option Friday-morning excursions and two more speaker sessions that afternoon!

We are offering discounted tickets for students, educators, and artists. Please email TEDxSMU@smu.edu to receive the discount code if you fit one of those categories.

The Majestic Theater
1925 Elm Street
Dallas, Texas, 75201
United States

Alanna Shaikh

Global Health Consultant, Executive Coach

Alanna Shaikh is a global health consultant and executive coach who specializes in individual, organizational and systemic resilience. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University and a master’s degree in public health from Boston University. She has lived in seven countries and it the author of What’s Killing Us: A Practical Guide to Understanding Our Biggest Global Health Problems. Recent article publications include an article on global health security in Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper and an essay in the Annual Review of Comparative and International Education. She blogs on coaching and personal resilience at www.thisworldneedsbrave.com.

Alicia Eggert

Interdisciplinary Artist

Alicia Eggert is an interdisciplinary artist whose work focuses on the relationship between language, image and time. Alicia's work has been exhibited at notable institutions nationally and internationally, including the CAFA Art Museum in Beijing, the Triennale Design Museum in Milan, the Corning Museum of Glass in New York, the Amsterdam Light Festival, the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA2012) at the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History in New Mexico, Sculpture By the Sea in Sydney, Australia, and many more. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Galeria Fernando Santos (Porto, Portugal), The MAC (Dallas, TX), T+H Gallery (Boston, MA), Harvard Medical School (Boston, MA), and Artisphere (Arlington, VA). Alicia’s work is represented by Galeria Fernando Santos in Porto, and Liliana Bloch Gallery in Dallas.

Amy Ho

ER Physician

Amy is an emergency medicine physician and nationally-published writer and speaker. Raised in Austin, TX, Amy graduated from The University of Texas at Austin with a B.S. in Biology. She earned her M.D. at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, where she was chapter president of the Texas Medical Association, class Vice President and earned the President’s Gold Service for Volunteerism. She graduated from her residency in emergency medicine from University of Chicago. It was during her time in medical school that her focus in health policy developed through her work with medical organizations and as she helped in organizing the state lobby days at the state Capitol for medical students. She served on the board of directors for both Texas Medical Association and American Medical Association’s political action committees (TEXPAC and AMPAC).

Andrés Ruzo

Geothermal Scientist

Andrés Ruzo is a National Geographic Explorer and host of the award-winning NatGeo Latin America show, Misterios del Inframundo (Mysteries of the Underworld). His work has been featured across NatGeo platforms, including the Channel, Magazine, Digital, and other media outlets. He is a geothermal scientist, conservationist, science communicator, and educator who in 2011 became the first geoscientist granted the shamanic blessing to study the sacred Boiling River of the Amazon. He is the founder and director of the Boiling River Project, a non-profit dedicated to understanding and protecting the Boiling River area by bringing together science, traditional Amazonian knowledge, and many other disciplines. He is based between Miami (USA) and Lima (Peru), holds degrees in Geology and Finance, and will soon be receiving his Geoscience Ph.D. (SMU). He is also a TED MainStage Speaker and TEDBook Author, and has been featured on numerous major media outlets across the globe.

Becca Peixotto

Underground Astronaut

Becca Peixotto, Ph.D., remembers as a child finding artifacts around her grandparents’ old farmhouse in Vermont and keeping them in a "museum" on shelves in the garage. However, it wasn’t until Peixotto went back to graduate school after a career as an outdoor educator that her passion for archaeology flourished. She earned her BA from the University of Alabama-Huntsville, an MA from the Universiteit van Amsterdam, and an MA in public anthropology and her Ph.D. at American University in Washington, DC, where she later served as Archaeologist in Residence. In between, she taught at outdoor science schools, managed high ropes courses, led wilderness expeditions in mountain and desert environments for youth and adults, and enjoyed many personal adventures in the United States and abroad.

Brigham Mosley

Performance Artist

Brigham Mosley is a writer/performer/sometime drag queen. He is currently co-devising the play “Playwrights in the Newsroom” with Janielle Kastner, based on two years spent shadowing the Dallas Morning News (premiering March 2020 in the AT&T Performing Arts Center’s “Elevator Project”). Brigham was a 2013 Performing Beyond Limits resident at NYC's The New Museum, as well as a member of the 2015 Dallas Theater Center Playwrights Workshop. He is a founding member of Dallas's The Tribe (winner of the 2016 Dallas Observer Mastermind Award) and was named a 2016 Queer Local of the Year by The Dallas Voice. His work has been produced by PS122, La MaMa, Dixon Place, The New Museum, and many others. He won the 2010 Kennedy Center regional award for Best One-Act and was a semi-finalist for the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's National Playwrights Conference in 2016 and 2017.

Camille Seaman

Extreme Photographer

Camille Seaman is a photographer whose work focuses on the fragile environments, extreme weather, and stark beauty of the natural world—from the deep greys of supercell storm clouds to the shocking blue of icebergs. As a TED Fellow and speaker, she urges us to connect to our surroundings: “I was taught from a very young age that we are connected to everything, that everything has a life force.” Camille strongly believes in capturing photographs that articulate that humans are not separate from nature. Her work has been featured globally in publications, including National Geographic and TIME and The New York Times. She has won many awards, is a Senior TED Fellow as well as a Stanford Knight Fellow. Seaman advocates the importance of recognizing the relationship between humans and their natural surroundings.

Christiane Marie Abu Sarah

Behavioral Historian

Christiane Marie Abu Sarah is a behavioral historian who studies emotions, decision-making, and moral cognition in social movements. She has managed projects and performed fieldwork in Iraq, Syria, Israel–Palestine, Egypt, Cuba, the Balkans, Northern Ireland, and Vietnam. From 2009–2012, she was a Research Associate at the Center for World Religions, Diplomacy, and Conflict Resolution (CRDC) in Arlington, Virginia. Today, she directs the Center for Behavioral and Cognitive History (BACH), where she is currently working on a book manuscript and digital history project entitled “To Drink a Cup of Fire: Morality Tales and Moral Emotions in Egyptian, Algerian, and French Anti-Colonial Activism.” The project collects the police confessions, diaries, manifestos, and court cases of activists who participated in violent attacks, recording how individuals crossed the thought–action divide, navigated emotional cues, and rationalized aggressive behavior.

Corey Clark

Computer Programmer, Game Designer

Dr. Clark began his career in the US Navy as a Nuclear Electrician, where he maintained the electrical systems for Naval Nuclear Power Plant on the Nimitz Aircraft Carrier (CVN-68). After his honorable discharge from the Navy Dr. Clark pursued his BS, MS and PhD in Electrical Engineering from UTA. His PhD dissertation (Simulation and Development of Nanoscale Deposition Techniques Using Kinetic Monte Carlo) focused on high performance nanoscale modeling and simulation of growth kinetics for Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE) and Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) of exotic materials such as Si/GaN heterogeneous super lattice structures.

Dave Gallo

Underwater Explorer

David Gallo is the senior adviser for Strategic Initiative at the Center for Climate Life Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. For more than 25 years, David Gallo has been at the forefront of ocean exploration, participating in and being witness to the development of new technologies and scientific discoveries that shape our view of planet earth.

Eric Hale

Elementary School Teacher

Eric Hale, a teacher at David. G. Burnet Elementary in Dallas Independent School District (DISD), has had a great year! He was just recognized as the top teacher in an urban school in the country by the Council of the Great City Schools (Queen Smith Award), was just chosen as Dallas ISD Elementary Teacher of the Year and was also honored as Best in Class on national television on The Kelly Clarkson Show! In 2016, he was a top 10 finalist for the prestigious Fishman Prize for Superlative Classroom Practice, which spotlights public school teachers who demonstrate exceptionally effective teaching with students from high-poverty communities. He was one of twelve teachers selected statewide to participate in Governor Abbott’s inaugural class of teachers charged with identifying and proposing solutions for challenges facing Texas educators.

Froswa' Booker-Drew, PhD

Cultural Currency Expert, Author, Vice President at the State Fair of Texas

Born and raised in Shreveport, Louisiana, Froswa’ Booker-Drew joined the State Fair of Texas in 2016 as director of community affairs and strategic alliances. Prior to joining the State Fair of Texas, she was national community engagement director for World Vision –US Programs, responsible for a team across the US including staff in North Texas. Froswa’ is responsible for the development and implementation of the State Fair’s philanthropy as well as the department’s community and educational programming. She is responsible for the creation of several State Fair signature programs including the Cohort for Concessions, Fairs and Expositions (CFFE), Community Engagement Day Convenings, and NXT FEST. She is also the Co-Founder of HERitage Giving Circle, the first African American Women’s Giving Circle in Texas. Froswa’ has been quoted in Forbes, Ozy, Bustle, Huffington Post, and other media outlets around the world.

Irene Iscla

Neurobiologist

Irene has always been fascinated by the living world, specially the ability of living organisms to sense and respond to their environment. This curiosity led to her embarking in the study of biology in her native country Argentina, where she obtained a PhD in Neurobiology at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). For her doctoral thesis, to understand how the sensory information affects movements like swimming in the leech, she studied sensory-motor neural circuits and their modulation by serotonin. Later she moved to Dallas to study the actual “molecular sensors” of mechanical stimulus, that are proteins in the membrane of cells that open in response to mechanical forces.

Janielle Kastner

Performance Artist

Janielle Kastner is a writer and performance deviser based out of Dallas, Texas. Currently she is co-devising the play “Playwrights in the Newsroom” with Brigham Mosley, based on two years spent shadowing the Dallas Morning News (premiering March 2020 in the AT&T Performing Arts Center’s “Elevator Project”). She recently premiered an avante-garde podcast titled UNTITLED DAD PROJECT (Spoke Media), her new play SWEETPEA will premiere in Second Thought Theatre’s 2020 season, and she is writing a new play commissioned by Dallas Theater Center, where she was an inaugural member of the Dallas Playwrights' Workshop with Will Power. She was named “Best New Playwright 2016” (Dallas Observer). Additionally, she formerly co-ran Dallas cult classic Shakespeare in the Bar, and currently co-runs Movies That Should be Musicals. She holds bachelor’s degrees in Theatre and English from Southern Methodist University.

Jill DeTemple

Religious Studies Professor

Dr. Jill DeTemple is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies, Department of Religious Studies, and, by courtesy, Associate Professor of Anthropology. Her research focuses on religiously sponsored development in Latin America and on the uses of dialogue for teaching in higher education. She is currently working on two projects. The first is a book that examines the risks of social capital approaches to development, especially when they are based in religious and gendered identities, due to release with the University of Notre Dame Press in March 2020. The second is an edited volume that introduces Reflective Structured Dialogue and attendant approaches to dialogic classrooms in postsecondary contexts.

John Sutter

Filmaker, Explorer

John D. Sutter is an EMMY-nominated documentary filmmaker who is directing “Baseline,” a film series that tells the story of the climate crisis beyond a human lifetime. He is an Explorer with the National Geographic Society, where he is developing the “Baseline” project. Sutter spent 10 years as a reporter, columnist and producer at CNN, most recently as a senior investigative reporter. He continues to work for CNN as a climate analyst. Sutter’s work has twice been nominated for an EMMY — for science reporting and new approaches to documentary. He is the recipient of the Livingston Award for Young Journalists, the Peabody Award, the Batten Medal for Public Service, the Foreign Press Association Media Award and the Edward R. Murrow Award, among others. He’s a former fellow at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism and at UnionDocs, a center for documentary art in Brooklyn.

Jose Bowen

Educator

José Antonio Bowen has been leading innovation and change for over 35 years at Stanford, Georgetown and the University of Southampton (UK), then as a dean at Miami University and SMU and as President of Goucher College (voted a Top 10 Most Innovative College under his leadership). Bowen has appeared on five continents as a pianist and conductor and withStan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie, Bobby McFerrin, Dave Brubeck, Liberace, and many others. His compositions include a symphony(nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 1985), and music for Jerry Garcia. Bowen holds four degrees from Stanford University, has written over 100 scholarly articles, is editor of the Cambridge Companion to Conducting (2003), and an editor of the 6-CD set, Jazz: The Smithsonian Anthology (2011).

Klaudia Oliver

Cultural Alchemist, Artivist, and Event Producer

Klaudia Oliver is an cultural alchemist, artivist, and event producer living in San Miguel de Allende, in the central highlands of Mexico. Her passions lie in creating positive societal change and consciousness through art, culture, community, and unique experiences and events. Her work as the Founder and President of La Calaca AC, a four day, participatory arts and culture festival, which explores and reveres the traditions of Day of the Dead, is rooted in her core belief that artistic interventions in public spaces can help bridge our differences, create a space of beauty, awe, and remembrance, and thus serve to heal our communities. In 2013, Klaudia was awarded “El Corazon de San Miguel”, by the mayor making her an official cultural ambassador of Conde Nast Traveller’s recently awarded “World’s Best City”.

Lewis Warren, Jr.

Pianist, Composer

Lewis Warren, Jr. is an award-winning pianist and an accomplished arranger and improviser. His special ability to connect with people through music was evident at an early age. Some of Lewis’s earliest accomplishments date back to 2006. He was a top Finalist in the International Russian Music Piano Competition in San Jose, had a premiere concert in Cancun, Mexico and was a guest artist at the Cancun Convention Center. He has been featured in many televised and broadcasted performances including NBC’s America’s got Talent in 2008, Nascar’s Samsung 500 at the Texas Motor Speedway in 2009 and the O’Reilly 500 in 2018 - in which he performed his own arrangements of the national anthem, and twice he has been featured in TEDx talks.

RonAmber Deloney

RonAmber Deloney is a native of Dallas, Texas. As a project manager, she enjoys being a visionary and watching the moving parts of a project connect and flow. As a professor, she is committed to honest, well informed critical thinking. As a performance poet, her stage act is a conversation about street corners, observations on classroom dialogues and a lyrical presentation of street images. As a DJ, she’s spinning Alice Coletrane and Tom Misch. In Berlin, she’s with the New Night Babies. A Fulbright research grant alumna, she has performed throughout Europe and worked with The Last Poets, and managed project budgets up to $500K. She has an MA in Art Politics from NYU, an MSEd. in Adolescent Education from St. Johns University and BAs in English and German from Austin College.

Yulise Reaves Waters

Justice Reformer

Yulise Waters is the Director of Dallas Programs for the Lone Star Justice Alliance where she oversees the programmatic, data, and community engagement aspects of the Second Chance Community Improvement Program. Waters co-founded SCCIP as an Assistant City Attorney for the City of Dallas and was responsible for securing one of ten 2016 Community Courts Grant Program grants awarded by the Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Assistance and the Center for Court Innovation, establishing SCCIP as the first-ever felony community court in Dallas County history and the first-ever alternative to incarceration for young adults in the State of Texas. SCCIP was also awarded the 2018 National Association of Drug Court Professionals’ Equity and Inclusion Award for “excellence and leadership in demonstrating and promoting cultural proficiency in treatment court services.” Prior to her role with the City of Dallas, Waters was partner in Cox Waters, P.L.L.C.