Theme: Synthesize. Mobilize. Humanize

People from around Tampa Bay and beyond came out to the new Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Fl to witness an amazingly passionate day filled with big ideas, great food, and deep conversations. The emotional afternoon presentations connected us as humans, reminding us of our desire to connect with each other, no matter where in the world we're from.

New Salvador Dali Museum
St. Petersburg, Florida, 33701
United States

Peter Kageyama

Peter Kageyama is the author of For the Love of Cities, a book about the emotional connections we have with our places and the benefits to cities for becoming more lovable and engaging. He is the co-founder and producer of the Creative Cities Summit, an interdisciplinary event that brings together citizens and practitioners around the big idea of the city. Peter is the former President of Creative Tampa Bay, a grassroots community change organization. He has spoken all over the world about bottom up community development and the amazing people that are making change happen.

Nadine Smith

Nadine Smith has been executive director of Equality Florida since its inception in 1997, and was executive director of its predecessor, the Human Rights Task Force of Florida prior to that. She joined the organization in 1993 after serving as one of four national co-chairs on the 1993 March on Washington and taking part in the historic, first-ever meeting between LGBT leaders and a sitting U.S. president (Clinton) in the White House. During her tenure as head of Equality Florida, she has also served four terms as co-chair of the Equality Federation and served as a member of the Democratic National Committee. She has led advocacy efforts in Florida at the state level at a time of unprecedented attacks on the LGBT community, serving as Equality Florida’s lead lobbyist in Tallahassee and heading efforts to stop discriminatory legislation and ballot measures and to overturn Florida’s ban on adoption by gay and lesbian parents. Her deep experience in community organizing, social change and politics includes her service as campaign manager for Citizens for a Fair Tampa, a successful effort to prevent repeal of that city’s human rights ordinance in 1995, and her own campaign in 1991 for Tampa City Council. In the latter, her first bid for public office, she emerged from a field of seven as the leading vote getter in the primary, losing narrowly in the runoff. Nadine has been recognized for her national and state leadership by organizations around the nation, including the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the Human Rights Campaign, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, the National Black Lesbian and Gay leadership Forum and others. A former award-winning journalist, Nadine has written syndicated columns for various LGBT and general audience publications.

Vineet Singal

Vineet Singal is a Stanford University student majoring in Biological Sciences. He is the founder and executive director of Anjna Patient Education, a non-profit organization that provides health education services to free clinics. Since its founding in January 2010, Anjna has received grants and awards from the Ashoka foundation, the Institute for the Future, Youth Service America, and DoSomething.org amongst others. Vineet is also the Executive Director of the non-profit organization A Hundred Thousand Cheeks, a Stanford Business School-led initiative in the U.S. to register 100,000 members of South Asian descent on the national bone marrow registry. He is an active board and committee member of numerous organizations, including the White House Youth Stakeholders, the DoSomething Healthy Schools Advisory Board, and the Ashoka Youth Venture. Vineet has also spoken at various conferences including at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, CA and has had speaking engagements at various high schools. Vineet has received numerous public service awards, including winning the BodyShock the Future Challenge and being one of the youngest winners of the President’s Call to Service Award. Vineet spends his free time volunteering at free clinics. A published author, Vineet is actively involved in neurology research at Stanford University School of Medicine. He has done past research for the National Institutes of Health and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

Pedro Jarquin

Originally from Nicaragua, Pedro was born with poetry and rhyme laced into his bloodstream. After a harrowing journey to the US to escape civil war when he was seven, Pedro grew up in the Washington D.C. area and spent most of his life on stage. Learning English by listening to Rap and Hip Hop artists, like Bone Thugs N Harmony, set the foundation for his seemingly effortless rhythmical freestyle future. HIP HOP & POETRY Pedro has a long history of spoken word poetry accomplishments for his age, including opening for Def Poetry Jam and other ticket mastered events in Tampa Bay Florida, although he seamlessly made his way into a more Hip Hop-focused career in 2008. El Poeta has performed for theatres, radio stations, art galleries, coffee shops, bars and clubs from Florida to Maine, DC to Colorado, and Europe to Central America. Pedro‚Äôs style has been compared to that of Eminem, Immortal Technique, Tupac, Sage Francis, and other greats. DISCOGRAPHY Pedro currently has a 2-disc album available for sale through Itunes, Amazon, and other online vendors as well as local retailers, such as Daddy Kool Records, entitled‚ “Pick Your Poison‚” Hip Hop and Poetry. The new cd‚”Street Reporter Mixtape”, will feature several different producers from Tampa Bay, including executive producer Lance‚”The Legend”, Quinn (producer for Bon Jovi’s first 2platinum albums, the Star Wars theme music, Talking Heads albums, etc.). The album will tell true tales from the street as reported by Pedro.

Saeid Nadjafi and Shayan Amini

Saeid “Natch” Nadjafi and Shayan Amini are former members of The Plastic Wave, an electronic rock band from Tehran, Iran that gained international notoriety in 2009 after being accepted to the prestigious SWSX music festival in Austin, Texas. The Plastic Wave, for whom performances in Iran were illegal because of their female lead singer, were featured in The Impossible Music Sessions in New York City in March 2010. Their story has been profiled by National Public Radio, Voice of America, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian UK, and numerous other media. Natch and Shayan’s new musical project is The Casualty Process.

Robert X. Forgarty

Robert X. Fogarty, 27, is the director of evacuteer.org and founder of Dear World. He started evacuteer.org after assisting the City of New Orleans to evacuate 18,000 residents without cars in advance of Hurricane Gustav, the largest hurricane evacuation in U.S. history. Evacuteer.org trains 500 volunteers each year to assist in the event of a mandatory evacuation and fills a critical component of the City of New Orleans’ emergency operations plan. The non-profit organization also researches and promotes innovative hurricane preparedness strategy. In 2011, Fogarty started Dear World, a scalable version of Dear New Orleans, his for-profit photography venture for social good. Fogarty has photographed thousands, including Super Bowl Most Valuable Player Drew Brees, Academy Award Winner Susan Sarandon and NBA All Star Chris Paul. His photos are viewed 1.5 million times every month online, and 10 percent of Dear New Orleans’ revenue goes to evacuteer.org.He graduated from the University of Oregon School of Journalism in 2005.

Bryan Roberts

Bryan is the founder and owner of Eco-Tech Construction, a Florida-based general contracting firm that focuses on the design and implementation of projects and communities that work in concert with natural systems. He has piloted projects that demonstrate both the practicality and affordability of Permaculture design principles by utilizing inherent properties of the site in combination with a choice of materials creating a built-environment that treads very lightly on its surroundings. For the past two years, Bryan has been developing the concept for EcoBuild Systems, a holistic systems-based approach to construction. Taking into account the unique characteristics of each site, its available resources and the inherent properties of the materials used the EcoBuild Systems building methods combine energy, water, and waste handling in a way that mimics natural systems to create projects and communities that function in harmony with their surroundings. This systematic approach creates spaces that are comfortable, intuitive, and affordable to inhabit. Through alliances with numerous organizations Bryan and a wide array of strategic partners have used their creative projects as community outreach tools through hands-on workshops, demonstrations, and lectures promoting transition in many facets of living. The Roosevelt 2.0 building in Tampa and The Florida Earthship Project in Manatee County serve as models of creative cost-effective sustainable enterprise, local food and energy production, and learning centers to promote a more sustainable and healthy lifestyle.

Hank Hine

Hank Hine is a writer and educator who serves as Executive Director of the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. His academic interests and publications include the subjects of text / image relationships, contemporary art and literature, and the opportunities of new media. Dr. Hine has led the Dali Museum in its creation of a new building to protect its collection and serve as the bricks and mortar for a new avant-garde.

Listen

An impressive array of local Tampa Bay Area musicians are coming together especially for TEDxTampaBay 2011 under the working title ‘Listen’ for this project. The collaboration features Emily Roff on Jazz Vocals, Stephen Fee on Opera Vocals, Jeremey Powell on the Keys (also famous for his mind-blowing Saxophone), Jon Shea on Bass, Adam Volpe on Drums, and Josh Formanek on Guitar. The group will perform original pieces composed and arranged specifically for the TEDxTampaBay 2011 event. This eclectic musical collaboration will take the audience on a listening journey that symbolizes the good things that come from sharpening ones ears… for the family, the community, and for the world…’Listen.’”

Anthony Flint

Anthony Flint is a Fellow and Director of Public Affairs at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a think-tank based in Cambridge, Mass., where he is engaged in writing and research about urbanism and development patterns. He is author of Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City (Random House, 2009). He was a visiting scholar at Harvard Design School while writing This Land: The Battle Over Sprawl and the Future of America, published in 2006 by Johns Hopkins University Press. He has been a journalist for twenty years, primarily at The Boston Globe, where he covered urban planning, development, architecture and transportation, and had a weekly column on urban design and public space. His articles and essays have appeared in The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, The Hartford Courant, the online journal PLANetizen, and PLANetizen’s “Contemporary Debates in Urban Planning” (Island Press 2007) Planningmagazine, Architecture Boston, Landscape Architecture, Architectural Record, The Next American City and Land Lines. He has also published papers on planning and transit for the Rappaport Institute of Greater Boston at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a chapter on planning in the book Governing Greater Boston. He was co-editor of the volume Smart Growth Policies. A graduate of Middlebury College and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, he served in 2005-2006 as education director at the Office for Commonwealth Development, the Massachusetts agency coordinating housing, transportation, environment and energy. He was also a Loeb Fellow at Harvard in 2000-2001. He is author of three blogs: At Lincoln House, This Land and Developing Stories.

Kenneth Cowart

Kenneth is an award-winning registered architect and active member of the local Tampa design community. He currently serves on the boards of Barrio Latino Commission, Creative Tampa Bay and superTEST. He is the co-founder of Refractory and Tampa SwedeFest. For the past two years he has hosted the local version of Pecha Kucha. Pecha Kucha, initially performed in Japan, has spread across the global and is hosted in nearly 400 cities. The presentation format of 20×20 creates a unique opportunity for community leaders in the arts, design, and technology to present their ideas to a new audience.

Venus Jones

Venus Jones grew up in Akron/Canton Ohio and currently resides in Tampa Bay. As a spoken word artist she becomes one with each enchanting poem she writes. Her messages promote peace, freedom and justice. She’s opened for Def Poetry on Broadway, produced the poetry troupe Multiverse and shared the stage with Tyne Daly and Grammy-nominated poet Nikki Giovanni. She‚’s a three-time Tampa Bay area slam winner and former slam finalist in the Austin International Poetry Festival. Her poetry has been published in the UK’s X magazine, Underground Poetz, Artists Embassy International. She’s been a requested feature at The Improv, The Salvador Dali Museum, The Ms. magazine annual cruise fundraiser, performing arts centers, poetry venues, conferences, schools, many universities and festivals across the country.

Xiaomei Jiang

Dr. Xiaomei Jiang is an Assistant Professor of Physics at the University of South Florida, she also currently serves as Lead Researcher in the ongoing development of New Energy‚’s SolarWindow © technology, and is credited with several important technical breakthroughs for achieving transparency on glass while generating electricity. Dr. Jiang’s expertise includes optical spectroscopies, organic semiconductors and optoelectronic devices, inorganic quantum dots synthesis and characterization, and solution processable photovoltaics. Dr. Jiang received her B.S. from Sichuan University in southwest China in 1987, and M.S. in theoretical condensed matters physics from Institute of Solid State Physics of the Chinese Academy of Science in 1990. In 2004 she received her PhD in experimental condensed matters physics from the University of Utah. She completed two years of postdoctoral work in Dr. Anvar Zakhidov’s group from 2004 to 2006 in University of Texas at Dallas. She has served as an Assistant Professor in the Physics Department of University of South Florida since August 2006.