Highlights - Actress CATHERINE CURTIN (Orange is the New Black) & Artistic Director KATE MUETH (Director, Educator, Choreographer)

Highlights - Actress CATHERINE CURTIN (Orange is the New Black) & Artistic Director KATE MUETH (Director, Educator, Choreographer)

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"I don't know why we would really want to tell stories without being connected to the meaning. And I think that's especially for women, but I do think for human beings, that is how we can work as hard and be able to get up the next morning and keep going. Because we are working through the meaning, and it feeds us as we're like making sense of it all, trying to make sense of it, and for being in community and communion.” - Kate Mueth
”What we've done today is we've made everything so fast and so easy that I think there's something to the creative process about it being a little bit more of an exploration than it is wham bam, it's done. Let's go have lunch. And I think there is something to the creative process where it's allowed to develop. It's called process because it is a process. I'm always glad to just relax in the creative process, and I'm always very grateful for that. I think it's why I do so much indie film because it's really fun.” -Catherine Curtin

Actress CATHERINE CURTIN (Stranger Things) & Artistic Director KATE MUETH (Neo-Political Cowgirls)

Actress CATHERINE CURTIN (Stranger Things) & Artistic Director KATE MUETH (Neo-Political Cowgirls)

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"I don't know why we would really want to tell stories without being connected to the meaning. And I think that's especially for women, but I do think for human beings, that is how we can work as hard and be able to get up the next morning and keep going. Because we are working through the meaning, and it feeds us as we're like making sense of it all, trying to make sense of it, and for being in community and communion.” - Kate Mueth
”What we've done today is we've made everything so fast and so easy that I think there's something to the creative process about it being a little bit more of an exploration than it is wham bam, it's done. Let's go have lunch. And I think there is something to the creative process where it's allowed to develop. It's called process because it is a process. I'm always glad to just relax in the creative process, and I'm always very grateful for that. I think it's why I do so much indie film because it's really fun.” -Catherine Curtin

MARGE PIERCY - NYTimes Bestselling Novelist, Poet & Activist

MARGE PIERCY - NYTimes Bestselling Novelist, Poet & Activist

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Novelist, Poet & Activist

People who take care of sick people and AIDS and teachers and garbage collectors and people who work in daycare…all the things that have to happen in society we pay shit for. We pay an enormous amount of money to people who can throw a ball through a hoop. We pay an enormous amount of hedge fund people. All the people who take over corporations go in and destroy get immensely rich while the people who do what we actually need doing, what we must have to survive, the people who grow food, the independent farmers that used to exist…

Highlights - JANE ALEXANDER - Tony & Emmy Award-Winning Actress, Conservationist, Author

Highlights - JANE ALEXANDER - Tony & Emmy Award-Winning Actress, Conservationist, Author

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Tony & Emmy Award-Winning Actress · Conservationist
Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts 1993-97

I did not seek out these roles like All the President's Men. I know that I was very interested in social and political issues from childhood. I don't know whether there was something in me that translated that I was politically and socially conscious when I was a young actress because these roles came to me. I didn't go out begging for them. And I was so grateful to have them because I thought they had a depth to them.

JANE ALEXANDER- Tony & Emmy Award-Winning Actress, Conservationist, Author

JANE ALEXANDER- Tony & Emmy Award-Winning Actress, Conservationist, Author

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Tony & Emmy Award-Winning Actress, Conservationist, Author
Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts 1993-97

I did not seek out these roles like All the President's Men. I know that I was very interested in social and political issues from childhood. I don't know whether there was something in me that translated that I was politically and socially conscious when I was a young actress because these roles came to me. I didn't go out begging for them. And I was so grateful to have them because I thought they had a depth to them.

E.J. KOH - Award-Winning Memoirist & Poet - “The Magical Language of Others”, “A Lesser Love”

E.J. KOH - Award-Winning Memoirist & Poet - “The Magical Language of Others”, “A Lesser Love”

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Award-winning Memoirist & Poet
The Magical Language of Others · A Lesser Love

I had delayed speech, and I had quite a bit of trouble with speaking. I think I must have been five before I was uttering some of my first words and trying to articulate. Simple communication was very difficult for me and my family, especially in a family where we were speaking several languages. They hoped to instill English. It’s the language of survival. There was a lot of frustration and fear in my relationship to language, and the relationship these languages had to each other, that was something I felt very sensitive to since I was young. Since before I could speak.

Highlights - DEBORA CAHN - Showrunner of The Diplomat starring Keri Russell - Exec. Producer Homeland, Grey’s Anatomy

Highlights - DEBORA CAHN - Showrunner of The Diplomat starring Keri Russell - Exec. Producer Homeland, Grey’s Anatomy

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Showrunner & Executive Producer of Netflix’s The Diplomat starring Keri Russell & Rufus Sewell
Exec. Producer Homeland · Grey’s Anatomy · Vinyl
Co-Producer The West Wing

So the idea was to look at what it's like to be an ambassador for the United States abroad and to do that in the context of a married couple, both of whom are in the same field. And what kind of tensions come from being in a relationship with somebody where you're both collaborators and personal partners and sometimes competitors? And what does that do to your life? What does it do to your work experience? And it felt like a military alliance and a marriage are not so different in many ways. You know, you get together under certain circumstances, and then time marches on and things change, and both parties change, and you're still in this relationship that either can or can't bend with you.

DEBORA CAHN - Showrunner & Executive Producer of Netflix’s The Diplomat starring Keri Russell & Rufus Sewell


DEBORA CAHN - Showrunner & Executive Producer of Netflix’s The Diplomat starring Keri Russell & Rufus Sewell


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Showrunner & Executive Producer of Netflix’s The Diplomat starring Keri Russell & Rufus Sewell
Exec. Producer Homeland · Grey’s Anatomy · Vinyl
Co-Producer The West Wing

So the idea was to look at what it's like to be an ambassador for the United States abroad and to do that in the context of a married couple, both of whom are in the same field. And what kind of tensions come from being in a relationship with somebody where you're both collaborators and personal partners and sometimes competitors? And what does that do to your life? What does it do to your work experience? And it felt like a military alliance and a marriage are not so different in many ways. You know, you get together under certain circumstances, and then time marches on and things change, and both parties change, and you're still in this relationship that either can or can't bend with you.

Highlights - MANUELA LUCÁ-DAZIO - Exec. Director of Pritzker Architecture Prize - Fmr. Exec. Director of Venice Biennale, Visual Arts & Architecture Dept.

Highlights - MANUELA LUCÁ-DAZIO - Exec. Director of Pritzker Architecture Prize - Fmr. Exec. Director of Venice Biennale, Visual Arts & Architecture Dept.

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Executive Director of the Pritzker Architecture Prize
Fmr. Executive Director of Venice Biennale (Dept. of Visual Arts & Architecture)

When I started and I had to decide what to do in life - because I was working with museums, in exhibition design, and on the restoration of buildings - and then at some point, I had the chance to arrive at the Venice Biennale and my whole perspective changed. And it changed because I was working with living artists and architects. Until that moment, I was working around Old Masters, works in museums, and things that were there with the aura of history. And all of a sudden I was dealing with living architects and artists, and this was, for me, the most incredible experience. So I decided to leave all the rest, because I was doing quite a lot at the same time, and to concentrate on the Biennale.

MANUELA LUCÁ-DAZIO - Executive Director, Pritzker Architecture Prize - Fmr. Exec. Director of Venice Biennale, Visual Arts & Architecture Dept.

MANUELA LUCÁ-DAZIO - Executive Director, Pritzker Architecture Prize - Fmr. Exec. Director of Venice Biennale, Visual Arts & Architecture Dept.

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Executive Director of the Pritzker Architecture Prize
Fmr. Executive Director of Venice Biennale (Dept. of Visual Arts & Architecture)

When I started and I had to decide what to do in life - because I was working with museums, in exhibition design, and on the restoration of buildings - and then at some point, I had the chance to arrive at the Venice Biennale and my whole perspective changed. And it changed because I was working with living artists and architects. Until that moment, I was working around Old Masters, works in museums, and things that were there with the aura of history. And all of a sudden I was dealing with living architects and artists, and this was, for me, the most incredible experience. So I decided to leave all the rest, because I was doing quite a lot at the same time, and to concentrate on the Biennale.

Highlights - Amanda E. Machado - Writer, Public Speaker - Founder of Reclaiming Nature Writing

Highlights - Amanda E. Machado - Writer, Public Speaker - Founder of Reclaiming Nature Writing

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Writer, Public Speaker, Facilitator · Founder of Reclaiming Nature Writing

So much of the travel industry was built on the idea of colonialism which really makes us all inherit this idea that whatever we need in life is going to come from seeking it elsewhere and grabbing it from somewhere else, I think looking at that, really deeply thinking about what is lost from that mindset and the harm that is caused by it has been something I've been trying to do over the last few years. And a lot of that has to do with land trauma, right? Like really acknowledging where our settlement of land comes from and how we can heal that in the ways that we travel.

AMANDA E. MACHADO - Writer, Public Speaker, Facilitator - Founder of Reclaiming Nature Writing

AMANDA E. MACHADO - Writer, Public Speaker, Facilitator - Founder of Reclaiming Nature Writing

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Writer, Public Speaker, Facilitator · Founder of Reclaiming Nature Writing

So much of the travel industry was built on the idea of colonialism which really makes us all inherit this idea that whatever we need in life is going to come from seeking it elsewhere and grabbing it from somewhere else, I think looking at that, really deeply thinking about what is lost from that mindset and the harm that is caused by it has been something I've been trying to do over the last few years. And a lot of that has to do with land trauma, right? Like really acknowledging where our settlement of land comes from and how we can heal that in the ways that we travel.

Highlights - ANNA ABRAHAM - Author of “The Neuroscience of Creativity” - Director of Torrance Center for Creativity

Highlights - ANNA ABRAHAM - Author of “The Neuroscience of Creativity” - Director of Torrance Center for Creativity

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Author of The Neuroscience of Creativity
Director of the Torrance Center for Creativity & Talent Development, University of Georgia

I love podcasts and things like that, if only to listen to people who've done incredible things. We live in a kind of unusual time where we can hear firsthand people talking about their own experiences, and what they went through when they were creating something. And while artists differ greatly from one another in terms of the specifics of their process, what certainly seems to be the case is that they're extraordinarily interested in their own mind, and they have what we would call a metacognitive awareness. They know almost quite precisely, at least what doesn't work for them. They're very cued into what to avoid and how to sort of generate the mental conditions that are necessary in order to be as generative or as creative as they're likely to be in a specific situation. So that is a deep medical awareness that they have about their own process that is really quite something. They know themselves very well.

ANNA ABRAHAM - Author of “The Neuroscience of Creativity” - Director of Torrance Center for Creativity & Talent Development

ANNA ABRAHAM - Author of “The Neuroscience of Creativity” - Director of Torrance Center for Creativity & Talent Development

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Author of The Neuroscience of Creativity
Director of the Torrance Center for Creativity & Talent Development, University of Georgia

I love podcasts and things like that, if only to listen to people who've done incredible things. We live in a kind of unusual time where we can hear firsthand people talking about their own experiences, and what they went through when they were creating something. And while artists differ greatly from one another in terms of the specifics of their process, what certainly seems to be the case is that they're extraordinarily interested in their own mind, and they have what we would call a metacognitive awareness. They know almost quite precisely, at least what doesn't work for them. They're very cued into what to avoid and how to sort of generate the mental conditions that are necessary in order to be as generative or as creative as they're likely to be in a specific situation. So that is a deep medical awareness that they have about their own process that is really quite something. They know themselves very well.

Highlights - Max Stossel - Award-winning Poet, Filmmaker, Creator of "Words That Move"

Highlights - Max Stossel - Award-winning Poet, Filmmaker, Creator of "Words That Move"

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Award-winning Poet, Filmmaker & Speaker
Creator of the Stand-Up Poetry Special Words That Move

Technology has very much changed the way we read and take in information and shortened it into quick bursts and attention spans. We're living in a new world, for sure. And how do we communicate in this new world? Not just in a way that gets the reach, because there are whole industries aimed at what do I do to get the most likes or the most attention, and all of that, which I don't think is very fulfilling as artists.

It's sort of a diminishing of our art form to try and play the game because then we're getting the attention and getting the hits, as opposed to what do I really want to create? How do I really want to create it? How do I want to display this? And can I do it in a way that breaks through so that if I do it my way, it's still going to get the attention, great. But if it doesn't, can I be cool with that? And can I be okay creating what I want to create, knowing that that's what it's about. It's about sharing in an honest, authentic way what I want to express without letting the tentacles of social media drip into my brain and take over why I'm literally doing the things that I'm doing.

Max Stossel - Award-winning Poet, Filmmaker, Creator of "Words That Move"

Max Stossel - Award-winning Poet, Filmmaker, Creator of "Words That Move"

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Award-winning Poet, Filmmaker & Speaker
Creator of the Stand-Up Poetry Special Words That Move

Technology has very much changed the way we read and take in information and shortened it into quick bursts and attention spans. We're living in a new world, for sure. And how do we communicate in this new world? Not just in a way that gets the reach, because there are whole industries aimed at what do I do to get the most likes or the most attention, and all of that, which I don't think is very fulfilling as artists.

It's sort of a diminishing of our art form to try and play the game because then we're getting the attention and getting the hits, as opposed to what do I really want to create? How do I really want to create it? How do I want to display this? And can I do it in a way that breaks through so that if I do it my way, it's still going to get the attention, great. But if it doesn't, can I be cool with that? And can I be okay creating what I want to create, knowing that that's what it's about. It's about sharing in an honest, authentic way what I want to express without letting the tentacles of social media drip into my brain and take over why I'm literally doing the things that I'm doing.

Highlights - Debra Fisher - Showrunner of Netflix’s “Ginny & Georgia” - Writer, Exec. Producer “Criminal Minds” , “Alias”

Highlights - Debra Fisher - Showrunner of Netflix’s “Ginny & Georgia” - Writer, Exec. Producer “Criminal Minds” , “Alias”

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Showrunner of Netflix’s Ginny & Georgia
Writer · Exec. Producer · Director · Alias · Criminal Minds · The OC · Charmed

I need a balance of light and dark. It can't be just one thing. I want you to be laughing one minute and by the end I want you to be crying. For me, character study is what is the most important. It all comes down to the characters. It's less about action or things like that, which you can have some of that, but it tonally, has to be female-centric and you have to be crying and laughing. There's so many interesting shows that walk that line of light and dark. I want to always live in the gray area with characters. Always. Nothing is ever black or white. It's always a weird gray area.

Highlights - Etgar Keret - Cannes Film Festival Award-winning Director - Author of “Fly Already”, “The Seven Good Years”

Highlights - Etgar Keret - Cannes Film Festival Award-winning Director - Author of “Fly Already”, “The Seven Good Years”

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Cannes Film Festival Award-winning Director
Author of Fly Already · Suddenly a Knock on the Door · The Seven Good Years

For me, there is something about art, it's not a monologue, it's a dialogue. Some people, it doesn't matter who they speak to, they will speak in the same way they would speak to a five-year-old or to an intellectual or to somebody who doesn't speak the language very well. They would speak the same way and they don't care because this is what they have to say, but I think that the natural thing in the dialogue is really to look into the eyes of the person you speak to and see when he understands or when she doesn't understand or when she's moved or when he's angry. And basically out of that, kind of create your own language.

Etgar Keret - Cannes Film Festival Award-winning Director - Author of “Fly Already”, “Suddenly a Knock on the Door”

Etgar Keret - Cannes Film Festival Award-winning Director - Author of “Fly Already”, “Suddenly a Knock on the Door”

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Cannes Film Festival Award-winning Director
Author of Fly Already · Suddenly a Knock on the Door · The Seven Good Years

For me, there is something about art, it's not a monologue, it's a dialogue. Some people, it doesn't matter who they speak to, they will speak in the same way they would speak to a five-year-old or to an intellectual or to somebody who doesn't speak the language very well. They would speak the same way and they don't care because this is what they have to say, but I think that the natural thing in the dialogue is really to look into the eyes of the person you speak to and see when he understands or when she doesn't understand or when she's moved or when he's angry. And basically out of that, kind of create your own language.

Highlights - Nina Hall - Author of “Transnational Advocacy in the Digital Era”


Highlights - Nina Hall - Author of “Transnational Advocacy in the Digital Era”


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Author of Transnational Advocacy in the Digital Era: Think Global, Act Local
Assistant Professor · International Relations · Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (Europe)

Digital advocacy organizations are recognized as influential actors by the media, politicians, and some academics. In 2016, GetUp, an Australian digital advocacy organization, was named by the Australian Financial Review as one of the top ten actors with ‘covert power’ in Australia.1 Campact in Germany has powerfully mobilized public opinion against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. MoveOn was one of the ‘leading advocacy organizations’ mobilizing people against the Iraq War in the United States. Meanwhile, Leadnow, a digital advocacy organization in Canada, helped to unseat Prime Minister Stephen Harper in the 2015 Canadian federal election. This new model of advocacy organization has spread around the world. Nineteen digital advocacy organizations claim to have a total of over 20 million members. What drove the global spread of digital advocacy organizations?