Theme: Adaptation

The pace of change is picking up speed, disrupting the inertia of the status quo. Technology, humanity -- and our own lives -- are evolving in real time, faster than ever before. This is an invitation to choose our response. Will we resist? Can we iterate? How will we transform? Perhaps we have already become swept up in this current that is taking us somewhere new. Together, we go forth into the unknown.

Click "Additional Links" on the left for the links to watch the three sessions from Adaptation premiering 11 brand new talks from the Minneapolis community.

Virtual
Your Home
Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55401
United States

Angela Kade Goepferd

Pediatrician

Dr. Angela Kade Goepferd (she/they) is the Chief Education Officer for Children's Minnesota, the Medical Director for the Gender Health Program, and also sees patients in the Children's Minneapolis Primary Care Clinic. Throughout their career, Dr. Goepferd has worked with and advocated for transgender and gender non-conforming youth and provide health professional training for pediatricians and clinic staff, social workers, school nurses and others to improve their skills and comfort working with LGBTQ patients and families.

Black Label Movement

Contemporary Dance Company

Choreographer Carl Flink founded Black Label Movement in 2005 as a creative laboratory and performance platform for his unique brand of athletic contemporary dance and to develop performers hungry to take it on. They are known for their wildly physical, socially conscious, intellectually and emotionally engaging art and unusual collaborations. Their credo is Move More | Understand More. Past TED speaker, McKnight Artist Fellowship recipient, and featured on TPT’s MN Original Series, Black Label Movement seeks to push the mind, body, and heart to the edge of what is possible and beyond.

DeLonn Crosby

Entrepreneur

DeLonn Crosby believes voice technology will transform how young people learn. As CEO of SayKid he has combined conversational software with a plush toy robot to help kids learn in a screen-less, natural, and engaging way. The play-based platform empowers kids to play the role of teacher, fosters agency through unstructured interaction, and builds relationships through group play. DeLonn earned his MBA from Harvard Business School and has held leadership roles with Target, Deloitte, and Google. He lives in Mound, MN with his wife Maria and three kids, Ella, Callahan, and Will.

Erika Lee

Historian

One of the nation’s leading immigration and Asian American historians, Erika Lee teaches American history at the University of Minnesota, where she is Director of the Immigration History Research Center. The granddaughter of Chinese immigrants, she is the author of award-winning books including America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States, which was called “essential reading” by Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist. Recently elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Erika is Vice President of the Organization of American Historians.

Matt "Nur-D" Allen

Your 7th Favorite Hip Hop Person

Matt Allen, known on stage as Nur-D, hit the MN Hip Hop scene in 2018 and has since performed at Soundset, shared the stage with Atmosphere, Tyler the Creator, Migos, and the Wu Tang Clan, and toured with Brother Ali. His album Songs About Stuff was featured by the StarTribune as one of the Best MN Albums of 2019. As a self-proclaimed goofy nerd who loves comic books and pro-wrestling, Matt brings an authentic, boundary-crossing style to the industry. His debut albums could be characterized as “clean rap”, free from cursing and featuring topics ranging from video games to body positivity.

Michael Fanuele

Marketing Strategist

Michael Fanuele is President at Assembly Media, which has been named an Ad Age “Agency of The Year”. His first book—Stop Making Sense: The Art of Inspiring Anybody—was published July 2019 and is already on its third printing. After graduating from Vassar College with an Honors Degree in Victorian Studies, Michael’s meandering career has led him from politics to comedy to advertising. He has spent most of his career as a marketing strategist working with brands like Dos Equis, Arby’s, Cadillac, Charles Schwab, Cheerios, Unilever, and Volvo.

Neely Tamminga

Consumer Economist

Neely Tamminga is a consumer behavior expert providing strategic, analytical, and research-driven insights to companies and boardrooms. In other words, she extracts clarity from a complex world to better form strategies for growth across the consumer sector. Neely is CEO and Chief Whiteboard Artist of DISTILL—a company she co-founded in 2017. During her 20-year career on Wall Street, she would routinely apply seemingly imperfect and disparate data to help ground conversations about consumer behavior to money managers and institutional investors and would regularly appear on CNBC, Bloomberg, and Fox Business News.

Ragamala Dance Company

Bharatanatyam Dance Artists

Ragamala Dance Company was founded in 1992 by Ranee Ramaswamy. Under the direction of Artistic Directors Ranee and Aparna Ramaswamy and Choreographic Associate Ashwini Ramaswamy (mother and daughters), the company’s work is rooted in the South Indian dance form of Bharatanatyam. Hailed by The New York Times as “soulful, imaginative, and rhythmically contagious,” Ragamala is in its 28th season of creating intercultural, collaborative performances that forge together ancestry and continuity.

Rahul Tiwari

Robotics Engineer

Rahul Tiwari is CEO of Spooky Action, a global robotics firm that builds the longest flying drones in the world and uses them to bring the internet to remote areas. A college dropout, Rahul left his engineering program at Purdue in 2017 to design and prototype a tethered anti-poaching watchtower drone that was deployed in South Africa only two months after the initial idea was conceived. His heavy-lift aircraft are used to provide internet coverage after disasters, for events and to support rural communities across the planet.

Sagirah Shahid

Poet

Sagirah Shahid is a Black Muslim poet, arts educator and performance artist. She was one of four poets selected by the City of Minneapolis to participate in "Nicollet Lanterns", a collaborative public arts project which transformed original poems into functional sculptural lanterns. Sagirah received a 2015 Loft Mentor Series Award in Poetry, a 2017 Minnesota Center for Book Arts mentorship award, and participated in the Twin Cities Media Alliance’s Our Space is Spoken For public arts and performance fellowship in 2018. Her debut collection of poetry "Surveillance of Joy" is forthcoming from Half Mystic Press.

Stephanie Carlson

Psychologist

Dr. Stephanie M. Carlson is a Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota, and is Co-founder and Chief Science Officer at Reflection Sciences, Inc. Dr. Carlson is an internationally recognized leader in the study of executive function (brain basis of self-control) and her current research focuses on ways to help promote executive function through reflective practices in play, parenting, and preschool curricula. She has been an advisor to Sesame Workshop, Understood.org, Noggin, Bright Horizons Family Solutions, and Minnesota Children’s Museum.