Anna-Maria Popa
Manager at Andrei Mureșanu Theater
Anna Maria Popa graduated from UNATC in 2000. She has been the manager of the Andrei Mureșanu Theatre since 2015. She is also a cultural manager, an authorized translator, a teacher at the Drama Department of Plugor Sandor High School in Sf. Gheorghe, and a theatre producer.
Anna Maria Popa is also the director of the DbutanT Theater Festival and Eva Filmmakers Fest film festival. Besides, she is the developer of the idea of “Floating Cinema&Theater” in Romania, as well as the inventor of VRTheater worldwide.
Chris Worman
Vice President, Alliances and Program Development at TechSoup
Chris Worman has been working with and for civil society since 1999. In 2005, Chris joined the Peace Corps and landed in Romania where he worked to launch Romania’s first (and the first Hungarian-language) Community Foundation – www.szka.org. In 2009, Chris opened TechSoup’s Romania program and launched much of TechSoup’s digital democracy work. Through a series of community-driven design challenges, more than 1.2 million Romanians engaged in defining and building anti-corruption solutions. Based on initial successes, Chris helped grow the program with TechSoup into www.TransparenCEE.org. Now that TechSoup is global, he is focused on leveraging TechSoup’s assets into deeper and more supportive relations with the 1 million+ NGOs served by the organization; and exploring the intersection of civil society and technology in the face of megatrends.
Csaba Lukács
Journalist
Starting from Parajd (a small commune in Harghita County, RO) he has visited more than a hundred countries as a volunteer for an international rescue aid organization specialized in international rescue. He lives now in Budapest, he is a journalist-director of a weekly newspaper and sometimes he also makes documentaries when he comes across a topic that needs to be told in a film. Many times he gets out of the boat - sometimes out of curiosity, on another time because things that do not work have to be let go.
Data visualization specialist and assistant professor in energy systems modelling
Dénes is a researcher and thinker interested in exploring the language of data: visualization 🌟
After studying in Abu Dhabi and Boston, he obtained a PhD in Interdisciplinary Engineering from Khalifa University, in collaboration with MIT. He currently holds an Assistant Professorship at Lancaster University in the UK, where has a research portfolio in modelling complex energy systems and a Visiting Assistant Professorship at UBB University in Romania, centred around data visualization and BI. He is the data visualization lead for the Romanian Economic Impact Monitor in Cluj-Napoca, Romania and the Economics Observatory in Bristol, UK. His data analysis and visualizations balance the fine line between work and hobby and he has led educational workshops on visualization, sustainability and renewable energy across developing regions in Asia and Africa. He is actively involved in mentoring youth, both in Hungary and Romania and also leads the data activism blogs Kontext and székelydata.
Founder of the Men’s Club (Férfiak Klubja), bestseller writer, economist
As a young man, he travelled around the world, and although being a Christian, he took a sip of Confucianist, Buddhist, Hinduist, and Islamic cultures. When everyone else was heading inwards, at the age of 23 he quit politics. After graduating college he settled down at a Hungarian bank, from where he was seduced by another sector, so at 26 he became the leader of a large industrial enterprise as the youngest manager of the country. At the age of 40, he decided to dedicate his knowledge, network, energy and his entire self to a social cause. Ignoring the spirit of the times and the warnings about opposite trends, he was committed enough to create the Men’s Club movement, that draws attention to the modern marginalisation of men regarding their families, their education and community building, to their crucial role played in holding together their families, and in the success of the next generation. Three of his published books are multiple bestsellers.fé
Jukka Sinnemäki
Class Teacher at the Jyväskylä Christian School in Finland
Jukka Sinnemäki is a Class Teacher at the Jyväskylä Christian School in Finland. In 2002 he received his Masters of Education. He studied two spring semester’s at the Teacher Training College in Kecskemét, Hungary. In 2005 he finished the Principal Preparation Programme, University of Jyväskylä. He gratuated 2014 from the Faculty of Humaties receiving MA. He finished a degree of Specialist Qualification of Product Development.
Jukka has 20 years experience from the teaching field. He describes himself as a risk taker, his motto is “learning happens when you see the unseen in every child”. He left the traditional school hierarchies behind and focused on children ́s community capacities, personalities, identities and wellbeing. He wanted to help children to live their own ideas. Jukka has been able to involve children and parents in projects that consider the child from a holistic perspective The biggest change that he has seen in his work is that children really enjoy coming to school.
Júlia Gyéresi
Assistant professor at University of Arts Târgu Mureș, coworker at Radio România Târgu Mureș
All her life until this point, Gyéresi Júlia – or Julika, as everyone knows her – was characterized by playfulness, tales, dreams, words and phrases saturated by expressed and internal contents. She is an actress who narrates and experiences exciting stories, she is a teacher who educates speech classes at the university creatively and playfully, she is a radio host who discusses current and interesting topics, she is a specialist author and a fairy tale writer.
As a child, she already believed that our state of mind is greatly affected by the way we are breathing and the quality of our voice. And when we speak, we transmit not only thoughts but also emotions. And there’s nothing more humane or more beautiful than to project our internal experience to other people sensibly and honestly. Because life truly can become much easier if we understand and feel each other!
Head of Leadership and Organizational Culture Practice at Trend Consult
Magor came home to develop leaders and shape organizational cultures with Trend Consult from Seoul, South Korea. He went to the far east to find a new challenge, new rules and new perspectives, and he went way out of his comfort zone, being the executive director of WWF Korea. Before he was trying to create rules for loggers, hunters, and industries in general, to make sure that the general drive for profit characterizing our society will not destroy the very planet that we are living on, as the director of WWF Romania. Tired of the rules and the never-changing boxes of the mainstream media, he founded and led the online information portal Think Outside the Box for a few years, right after a brief political career, where he created rules as a member of the European Parliament. For that, he quit a potential university career, after teaching at the UBB, for 2 years. He never understood the idea of rules, he prefers common sense and constructive empathy.
Mária Botházi
Journalist
Botházi Mária was born in 1977 in Odorheiu Secuiesc, she lives in Cluj-Napoca since 1997. She completed her studies at the Department of Journalism of the Babeș-Bolyai University, (she studied journalism at Babeș-Bolyai University), where she is now a university lecturer.
She has worked as a journalist for several Transylvanian newspapers and she is currently a publicist for the Főtér portal.
In her popular scratches, her opinion gives us a mirror of our everyday lives, how we Hungarians live in Transylvania.
Her themes are the global transformations of everyday life: the anomalies of family life, the internal and external constraints of being accepted, what does it mean to be a woman, the limitations of female-male roles, how social expectations appeared in her writings humorously, ironically, with easier playfulness. Her volumes published by Koinónia (Biorobot, 2019 and Boldogság juszt is a tiéd, 2016) were running through several editions.
Scrum Master/Business Analyst/Experienced Trauma Survivor
Crazy but honest.
If somebody would ask me to describe myself, I think, that would be the phrase I would use.
My name is Oana-Maria Rotariu and this is my journey!
I could start this section by telling you that I’ve graduated from the University of Mathematics-Informatics and Psychology and I have a Master’s degree in Bioinformatics. That I love studying the human mind and social behaviour and I also love fashion design and make-up.
But that wouldn't be 100% honest, would it? I would be trying to project an image of myself, that, in my opinion, YOU, my dear reader, would like and appreciate.
I would do my best to show you how wonderfully nice I am, that picture-perfect image of a human being that you would like, admire and follow. But then again, that wouldn't be the real me.
I am full of flaws like any other human, flaws that I've learned to love, cope with or change in my time living on this Planet.
So let’s break the rules together and see beyond appearances, see with our souls.
Piroska Dr. Darvas
Sister of the Helpers of the Holy Souls
My name is Darvas Piroska, and I was born in 1972, in a simple family that carried out agricultural activity. I joined the Society of the Helpers of the Holy Souls when I was 19 years old. I studied social work services in Hungary, and thanks to this I became better acquainted with the Roma community. I obtained a PhD in Theology in Vienna, which brought a new perspective for me about the world and significantly changed the way I think about religion. In our community, I participated at many international events.
I returned to Romania more than 20 years ago. In Targu Mures, I carried out community-building and spiritual activities with university students for 7 years. At the moment I lead the Szent Margit Retreat House in Sandominic.
My work is characterized by internationality, respect for differences, crossing borders, attention to the signs of the times and openness to everything that serves life against surviving.
Radu Negoiță
Architect
He is an architect with a passion for the avatars of living and the relationship that people build with their environment. He often thinks about what the home of the future should look like, and he doesn’t see it at all as a high-tech lab saturated with touch-sensitive surfaces - it feels more like a "fusion" sanctuary that helps you to better know and understand yourself, helped by technology, but not dominated by its presence. His doctoral thesis was about probing the dimension of the humans’ relationship with matter, a deeper look into the perceptual mechanisms that make psychological comfort possible. He has committed himself to run a Facebook page, "Case Strâmbe pe Radar", that aimed to educate the public about what their expectations should be regarding their home environment. In 2018 he published a book about the high percentage of uncomfortable new apartments ("Disconfort Residence", Editura Publica).
Zsolt Nagy
Member of the board, NIRO INVESTMENT
Disrupted by inter-ethnical conflict in his hometown, at the age of 18 he started to search relevant means that can break the anger and hostility among people. As youth activist, he organized student camps, scientific debates and has established the local branch of European youth network. Becoming leader of the Hungarian political party at 24, gave him the opportunity to change the rules again: reframing the internal structures in a more productive and transparent way. As the youngest Minister for IT&C in Europe, he succeeded historical change in the Romanian telecom market. But two of his objectives were politically untouchable and he paid a price for this idealistic dream: 8 years trial, more than 2 years in jail and no legal arguments till this day. As entrepreneur and business leader from 2007, he had to reinvent himself. And break another cycle. This time, his own. The common trait in these phases: to break inefficient cycles and make that place a better, valuable, relevant one.