TEDxPortofSpain Announces our Second Batch of Speakers

As anticipation builds for this year’s conference centred around the theme of Connecting, we are thrilled to announce our second batch of speakers for TEDxPortofSpain 30.11.13 at the Central Bank Auditorium! Over the next few weeks we will be announcing more speakers, but we wanted to let you know that tickets will be available for reservation from September 25th at 9:00am through our website.

We have an incredible list of speakers this year, starting with:

• Wayne Kublalsingh
• Stacy-Marie Ishmael
• Attillah Springer
• Etienne Charles

Attillah Springer

Attillah Springer is a writer and activist born in Trinidad. She is a stickfighter in training and has been a flag woman for Phase 2 Pan Groove and 3 Canal’s Jouvay band. She also DJs under the name Tillah Willah. It was while engaging inner city residents on skin bleaching that she developed an interest in using media for advocacy and activism particularly for those whose voices remain silenced by mainstream agendas.

In London, she has worked with the London Language and Literacy Unit’s programmes in migrant communities, empowering parents’ indigenous knowledge to engage their children with the English educational system.

An environmental activist, she has organized events around industrialisation versus sustainability in rural Trinidad since 2005 using Carnival and other indigenous festival arts as forms of protest or awareness building. In July 2007 she represented local environmentalists at the Global Impacts of Heavy Industry Conference in Reyjavik, Iceland.

As a journalist she has worked as producer/presenter and Head of News for Gayelle TV and as part of the Carnival coverage team for TV4. She is also a Director of Idakeda Group a collective of women in her family creating cultural interventions for social change especially among women and youth in socially vulnerable communities in Trinidad and Tobago.

 

 

Etienne Charles

Etienne Charles is a Recording Artist, Composer, Arranger, and an Assistant Professor of Jazz Studies at Michigan State University. Hailed by The New York Times as “an auteur” he is known as one of the most compelling and exciting young jazz artists of our time, he is known for ushering the genre into groundbreaking new territory by buoyantly tapping into a myriad of styles rooted in his Afro-Caribbean background, exploring the musical depths of the islands, from calypso to Haitian vodou music. Also in the jazz amalgam mix are rock steady, reggae, belair, and rock as well as the influence of Motown and R&B music Charles listened to on his parents’ record player when he was growing up.

“Jazz is Creole music… as a person in the new world, I’ve been influenced by so much music. And my family has a mixed background, with French Caribbean, Spanish and African roots as well as Venezuelan influences. I come from a fusion of rhythms, a fusion of cultures.”

As befitting an artist who excels with such a diversity of musical styles, Charles has performed with a range of musicians, from Roberta Flack, Rene Marie and David Rudder to Wynton Marsalis, Johnny Mandel, the Count Basie Orchestra and Maria Schneider. He also worked with steel pan all-star Len “Boogsie” Sharpe as well as NEA Jazz Masters Frank Foster and Benny Golson.