Storytelling In The Modern World
Friday, March 28, 2008
Session Description
How do you use storytelling to extend the influence of your work? What happens when your storytelling becomes so powerful that it challenges the status quo? Ken Brecher, social anthropologist and executive director of the Sundance Institute, will lead a vigorous session on storytelling in the modern world; a world where narrative can be a measure of relevance, and your ability to speak to multiple audiences could be the key to your success and the source of your greatest challenges.
Time & Location
Time:
09:00 - 11:00, Friday, March 28, 2008
BST
Speakers
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Speaker
Bill Strickland is the founder and Executive Chairman of Manchester Bidwell Corporation (MBC), an educational model designed to create empowering educational environments for adults-in-transition as well as a diverse population of youth in the Pittsburgh, PA region. A past Skoll awardee, Strickland's model has been replicated in 14 cities in the US and Internationally. Bill founded Manchester Craftsmen's Guild in 1968 to help combat economic and social devastation experienced by residents of his Northside Pittsburgh neighborhood. Later in 1972 he assumed leadership of Bidwell Training Center to guide its transition to providing skills relevant to Pittsburgh's economy. Grammy winning MCG Jazz was founded in 1987, which is one of the longest jazz subscription series in America. What started as an informal art program and exhibition space has been transformed into a 62,000 sf arts and career training center, which today includes a 40,000 sf production and educational greenhouse.
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Speaker
Research Scientist, St. Michael’s Hospital
Dr. Orbinski believes in humanitarianism, in citizenship and in actively engaging and shaping the world we live in so that it is more humane, fair and just. Dr. Orbinski has extensive field experience with Medecins sans Frontires in Somalia, Afghanistan, Rwanda and Zaire. He was elected MSF’s international president from 1998 to 2001, and launched its Access to Essential Medicines Campaign in 1999. In 1999 he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to MSF for its pioneering approach to medical humanitarianism, and for its approach to witnessing. He is now a research scientist at St. Michael’s Hospital, and associate professor of both medicine and political science at the University of Toronto. He is a founder and Chair of Dignitas International, a hybrid research NGO focused on community based care, prevention and treatment for people living with HIV in the developing world. Dr. Orbinski was the storyteller in a documentary film on humanitarianism, screened at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, titled Triage.
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Speaker
Co-founder, Qatar Computing Research Institute
Erik Hersman is a co-founder of
Ushahidi, a free and open source platform for crowdsourcing information and visualizing data, founder of
AfriGadget, a site that showcases stories of African inventions and ingenuity, and is in charge of the
iHub, Nairobi’s Innovation Hub for the technology community.
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Speaker
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.
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Speaker
Founding Director, International Resource for Impact and Storytelling
An award-winning independent media field builder, Cara is Founding Director of the International Resource for Impact and Storytelling (IRIS), a donor collaborative supporting creative visual storytelling and narrative analysis in the public interest. IRIS is a grantee partner of Skoll Foundation. Cara served at Ford Foundation as Director, JustFilms, piloting a network-focused, narrative-informed, cultural grantmaking strategy which was integrated across Ford’s ten regions and global strategies. She was Director, Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program, funding dozens of non-fiction films, co-founded Doc Society’s Good Pitch event and training model and created the Stories of Change initiative with the Skoll Foundation. Cara has received multiple Emmy Awards, George Foster Peabody Awards, and duPont-Columbia Awards.She received a Webby Award for creating P.O.V.’s Borders, a pioneering web series on PBS. She is a member of AMPAS and the WGA and lives in New Jersey, USA.
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Speaker
Director, Producer, Owner, Break Thru Films
Annie Sundberg is a filmmaker and writer based in New York City. Together with Ricki Stern at Break Thru Films, she directed and produced the documentary features The Devil Came on Horseback (2007) and The Trials of Darryl Hunt (2006). Annie also produced Tully (2002) and the documentaries In My Corner (1999) and One Survivor Remembers (1995). Annie g
