Unfinished Portraits Of Powerful Ideas: Kenneth Brecher
Video Description
Kenneth Brecher, executive director of the Sundance Institute, speaks at the 2009 Skoll World Forum’s opening plenary. In his talk, “Unfinished Portraits of Powerful Ideas,” he talks about the significance of poetry and tells a powerful story about Stalin asking a woman to write a poem praising him in exchange for releasing her son.
Speakers
-
President, Library Foundation of Los Angeles
Kenneth S. Brecher is president of the Library Foundation of Los Angeles. He was formerly executive director of the Sundance Institute, president of the William Penn Foundation, director of the Boston Children’s Museum, and associate artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum. An anthropologist by training, Brecher was an honors graduate of Cornell and a Rhodes Scholar. He has received numerous fellowships, including a research grant from the Getty Center for Education in the Arts and a Ford Foundation Fellowship for his study of Amazonian tribesmen. He has lectured and published widely and served as an international consultant on challenges facing arts leadership. He has been a keynote speaker at the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship and played a central role in organizing the closing plenary on the importance of activist artists in social change.
He is the author of Too Sad to Sing: A Memoir with Postcards and editor of the classic Xingu: The Indians and Their Myths, by Orlando and Claudio Villas Boas. His installation “The Little Room of Epiphanies” was at the Santa Monica Museum of Art.
-
Chair of The Elders, The Elders
Mary Robinson is a founding member and Chair of The Elders, an independent group of global leaders founded by Nelson Mandela in 2007, who work together for peace, justice, human rights and a sustainable planet. She has served as Chair since 2018, and is a passionate advocate for gender equality, human rights and climate justice. She has addressed the UN Security Council on multiple occasions and has met with world leaders including President Ramaphosa in South Africa, Pope Francis in the Vatican, President Macron in Paris and President Xi Jinping in Beijing. She was the first woman President of Ireland (1990–1997) and is a former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (1997–2002). From 2013- 2016, she served as the UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy in three roles; first for the Great Lakes region of Africa, then on Climate Change and then on El Niño and Climate. She was appointed Adjunct Professor for Climate Justice at Trinity College Dublin in 2019.
