
TEDWomen 2019
The theme for this year's TEDWomen conference is "Bold + Beautiful." Find out more about attending at the official TED website.
Learn about some of the key events happening soon that I'm producing, hosting, speaking at, moderating, or just plain attending, most of which relate in one way or another to empowering women and girls.
The theme for this year's TEDWomen conference is "Bold + Beautiful." Find out more about attending at the official TED website.
Learn about this year's lineup and find links to buy tickets or volunteer here.
Registration for TEDWomen 2018 is open now! Space is limited and I don’t want you to miss out. This year, TEDWomen will be held in Palm Springs, California. The theme is Showing Up.
Summer brings more than great weather to Aspen -- it brings the perfect climate for big thinking about the issues surrounding healthcare, health science, and global health. This June 21-24, the Aspen Institute will present Spotlight Health, the nation's premier gathering of scientists, clinicians, policy makers, administrators, journalists and philanthropists. View videos from past festivals.
The Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship seeks to accelerate entrepreneurial approaches and solutions to the world’s most pressing problems by uniting social entrepreneurs with essential partners in a collaborative pursuit of learning, leverage, and large-scale social change. This year's theme is the Power of Proximity: "In order to address inequality and injustice, we must more deeply understand the current status quo—and how to disrupt it."
In 2018, the year that marked the 100th anniversary since some women got the vote in the UK, and when #MeToo shook the world, the WOW festival organizers brought together artists, writers, politicians, comedians, activists and more for the 8th annual WOW London at Southbank Centre. Learn more at the official WOW website.
On Valentine’s Day 2018, V-Day celebrated its 20th anniversary! As a V-Day board member since the beginning, I have witnessed the changes that V-Day and its sisterhood of courageous activists all over the world are creating amidst the ongoing violence that affects one in three women in the US and the world. Read my blog post reflecting on Eve Ensler and the amazing work by local V-Day activists across the world, raising over $100 million dollars for grassroots anti-violence groups, rape crisis centers, domestic violence shelters, and safe houses in places like Kenya and Afghanistan. decades.
At Sundance Film Festival's annual Women's Leadership Brunch this year, I had the privilege and responsibility of moderating a panel intended to highlight some of the activism and initiatives that have emerged from the #MeToo movement. Read my blog post for a lightly edited version of my remarks introducing the panel and some highlights from our discussion.
This year’s TEDWomen in New Orleans was a truly special conference, at a vital moment, and I’m sure the ripples will be felt for a long time to come. The theme this year was bridges: we build them, we cross them, sometimes we even burn them. Our speakers talked about the physical bridges we need for access and connection as well as the metaphoric ones we need to bridge the differences that increasingly divide us. Watch some of the talks at Ted.com and read my blog post about the event.
The Spotlight Health forum covered a lot of ground in search of common ground on new challenges to reproductive justice and human rights. The forum welcomed 1,000 physicians, scientists, activists and frontline leaders, many facing rollbacks on government-sponsored medical research, climate action and other policies, to share ideas and solutions. Read my blog post to watch videos and panels from this informative conference with speakers including Planned Parenthood's Cecile Richards, Care.com Founder and CEO Sheila Marcelo, National Domestic Workers Alliance director Ai-Jen Poo, and many, many others.
Getting to meet the social entrepreneurs and learn about their work is one of the compelling reasons that Scott (my husband) and I have attended 13 of the 14 years of the Skoll World Forum. This year, we felt an even greater connection to the community as this was my first as a member of the Skoll Fund board. Read my blog post to learn more about this amazing community of entrepreneurs.
For the first time, over 300 Acumen fellows gathered together to share a decade of learning with each other. The Acumen community is committed to accelerating social change, together. Read my blog post to learn more about the creative and innovative enterprises that Acumen had identified and invested in as solutions for serving poor communities with sustainable businesses.
WOW – Women of the World festival celebrates women and girls, and looks at the obstacles that stop them from achieving their potential. Why is gender equality taking so long to achieve? Southbank Centre's festival is a global network of festivals which provides a platform for interrogating this question. WOW 2017 speakers included Angela Davis, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Gemma Cairney, Sandi Toksvig and Gillian Anderson.
I participated in the fourth Women Working for the World conference in Bogota, Colombia. It’s a privilege to invite US activists such as Musimbi Kanyoro of the Global Fund for Women, Daniela Ligiero of Together For Girls, and writer Miriam Zoila Pérez to speak about their work on reproductive rights, girls empowerment and philanthropy. Read my blog post about the amazing speakers who shared their stories.
TEDWomen is a conference that I co-founded and co-curate with TED. We’ll be convening for our fifth year in 2016, October 26-28 in San Francisco. Some of you may have seen the “save the date” announcement that recently went out; if you didn’t, make sure you’re signed up for the TEDWomen newsletter, where we’ll announce pre-registration in early 2016, and share more information as we develop the event’s theme.
This will be the third year of this conference, which Catalina Escobar and the Juan Felipe Gomez Escobar Foundation convene in Bogota, Colombia.
Learn about this year's lineup and find links to buy tickets or volunteer here.
In December I'll be traveling to Cuba with the Sundance Institute board to participate in the International Festival of the New Latin American Cinema. We will be leading workshops and training sessions for writers and directors and visiting the well-respected Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión, which counts the writer Gabriel Garcia-Marquez among its founders. Learn more about my work with the Sundance Institute.
I'll be speaking with my good friend Robert Redford at the Paley Center for Media in New York City about the new feature film Truth, a political drama in which he stars as Dan Rather during the end of his tenure as anchor of the CBS Evening News. We'll also cover everything from his early career to his activism in the area of land conservation, plus the latest news from the Sundance Institute, which he founded and where I serve as chair of the board. Learn more.
I am honored to be leading a plenary session on the image of women in media at this event produced by The Gender Park in Kerala, India in association with UN Women. The agenda for this first conference in a series is focused on "gender inequalities and the need to find different ways of strengthening inclusion of women in the development process." Learn more.
Join the Women's Media Center for its annual awards dinner, where we honor women who have had exceptional careers in media. I'm proud to be presenting this year's Pat Mitchell Lifetime Achievement Award to PBS NewsHour co-anchors Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff. Learn more.
The Women's Funding Alliance advances leadership and economic opportunity for women and girls in Washington State. I'm pleased to be keynoting their annual Leadership Breakfast. Learn more.