Sight & Sound Productions is proud to announce that we will partner with TEDxJacksonville for the sixth year in a row, providing production services for the daylong conference.

Join us Saturday, October 20th at The Florida Theatre for “Exchange: Conversations for the Curious.” The event will play host to 12 speakers who will encourage the audience to shift their perspectives through the power of exchange.

THE 2018 TEDXJAX SPEAKER LINEUP:

Anne Driscoll, Dublin, Ireland — An award-winning journalist, Driscoll has investigated wrongful convictions as senior reporter at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University and as a 2013-2014 U.S. Fulbright scholar. She is project manager for the Irish Innocence Project at Griffith College Dublin.

Benjamin Evans III, Los Angeles — An author, activist, actor and minister, Evans received his MBA from Florida Agricultural & Mechanical University before moving to Miami to pursue his career in accounting. While in Miami he co-founded the iconic BMe Community, a national movement of community builders that are led and inspired by black men.

Iris Grant-Simmons, Jacksonville — As CEO and President of the Genési Group Inc., Grant-Simmons facilitates dialogue with for-profit and nonprofit entities in developing strategies that expose areas of benefit not readily identified through traditional models in philanthropy, corporate social responsibility, community engagement, fundraising and brand awareness.

Jeffreen Hayes, Chicago — A trained art historian and curator, Hayes merges administrative, curatorial and academic practices into her cultural practice of supporting artists and community development. Among her many curatorial projects is “Augusta Savage: Renaissance Woman,” which opens at the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens in October and continues through April 7, 2019.

Kristin Keen, Jacksonville — Keen has spent her career creating opportunities through business for women caught in human trafficking to have access to a new life. She helped co-founded Sari Bari, a thriving business that now employs more than 120 citizens of India. As the founder and executive director of Rethreaded, she has employed more than 35 women and provided more than 55,000 hours of work for survivors of human trafficking.

Ash Perrin, London — Drawing on his work as an entertainer and a clown who cares passionately about the health and happiness of children, Perrin launched The Flying Seagull Project more than 10 years ago. Since then, the group has worked with more than 100,000 children in hospitals, orphanages, deaf/blind schools, refugee camps and slums around the world.

Anunnaki Ray Marquez, Orange Park — Born intersex and assigned the wrong gender at birth, Anunnaki Ray lived as female for the first 46 years of life before emancipating his authentic male gender in 2014. Anunnaki is in the process of receiving a birth certificate from the state of Colorado recognizing that his true biological sex is intersex and not a disorder. He would be the third person to be recognized as intersex in the U.S.

Philip Robbie, Jacksonville — As the National Design Director for RS&H, Robbie reflects not on the projects he saw to completion, but on those that remained unbuilt. This condition is common well beyond the architecture field: we all have projects left unbuilt, songs left unsung, stories left unwritten, and ideas that were undefended and never realized. Robbie argues that we must find the courage to build the unbuilt, write the unwritten, sing the unsung and defend the undefended.

Claudia Wilner, New York City — At the National Center for Law and Economic Justice, Wilner works to combat unlawful civil and criminal justice debt collection practices. For most of us, a simple traffic ticket is an expensive annoyance. But for millions of our fellow citizens — disproportionately, low-income people of color subject to discriminatory policing policies — it’s a financial calamity that creates a spiral of bad consequences. Wilner argues we must correct the inequities in our policing practices and our license revocation laws, which effectively criminalize poverty.

Joy Wolfram, Jacksonville — Dr. Joy Wolfram is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Mayo Clinic in Florida, where she leads the Nanomedicine and Extracellular Vesicles Laboratory. She also holds affiliate faculty positions at the Houston Methodist Hospital in Texas, the Department of Biology at the University of North Florida, and the Wenzhou Institute of Biomaterials and Engineering in China. Her goal is to bring new nanomedicines with increased therapeutic efficacy and safety to the clinic.

Mark Woods, Jacksonville — Mark Woods has been a columnist for The Florida Times-Union since 2001. After winning the Eugene C. Pulliam Fellowship, allowing him to take a one-year sabbatical writing about the future of the national parks, he published “Lassoing the Sun: A Year in America’s National Parks” in 2016. It won the Florida Book Awards gold medal for nonfiction. Woods makes the case that preserving “America’s best idea” is a constant battle — one that has become even more urgent in the years since the National Park System turned 100 in 2016.

Brian Wu, Scarsdale, New York — Currently a sophomore at the Horace Mann School in New York City, Brian Wu has an unquenchable thirst for anything related to aerospace engineering and astronomy. Over the past year, he has been working on a graduate-level research project at the University of Florida, which led to the tentative discoveries of nine Giant Planets, two Brown Dwarfs, and the first low-mass Circumbinary Planet to be detected using Doppler spectroscopy. A circumbinary planet is a planet that orbits two stars rather than one. Wu continues in his ultimate goal of discovering potentially habitable Earth-sized planets.

Discover more at TED x Jacksonville FL Event Production