Program Hosts
TEDActive 2012 will be co-hosted by TED's Director of Content and TEDActive Kelly Stoetzel, and Rives. The TED2012 stage at Long Beach will be hosted by TED Curator Chris Anderson, TED's Executive Producer of Media, June Cohen, and TED's European Director Bruno Giussani. Session 9 will be hosted by Chee Pearlman and David Rockwell.
Kelly Stoetzel, Director, TED Content and TEDActive
As the Content Director at TED, Kelly Stoetzel spends most of the year working on the speaker program. "Assembling and working with 50 of the most interesting and relevant people in the world is at least as much fun as it sounds," she says. She is the Director and co-host (with Rives) of TEDActive, the intimate, relaxed, participatory, speculative and very, very fun event featuring special workshops, unique experiences, and a live simulcast of the speakers in Long Beach. Before TED, she was the Director of Mixed Greens, a contemporary art gallery with the goal of making contemporary art a little more accessible.
Rives
Storyteller and poet Rives is the star of the new special "Ironic Iconic America." A regular on HBO's Def Poetry Jam, he's the co-host of the upcoming TEDActive simulcast event in Palm Springs. Offstage, Rives designs and writes pop-up books. The pop-up books he creates for children unfold with surprise: The Christmas Pop-Up Present expands to reveal moving parts, hidden areas and miniature booklets inside. On stage, his poems burst in many directions, too, exposing multiple layers and unexpected treats: childhood memories, grown-up humor, notions of love and lust, of what is lost forever and of what's still out there waiting to unfold.
Chris Anderson, Curator, TED
Chris Anderson is the curator of the TED Conference. His first publishing company, Future Publishing, grew rapidly under the motto "media with passion." Expanding to the United States, he built Imagine Media, publisher of Business 2.0 magazine, and creator of the games website IGN. Thanks to this success, Anderson created the Sapling Foundation, which hoped to find new ways of tackling global issues by leveraging media, technology, entrepreneurship, and ideas. Sapling acquired the TED Conference in 2001, and Anderson left his businesses to focus on TED, developed it as a platform for identifying and disseminating ideas worth spreading.
June Cohen, Executive Producer, TED Media
As Executive Producer of TED Media, June Cohen has been responsible for bringing the TED Conference online and helping to grow its audience to more than 150 million viewers worldwide. In 2006, she launched TEDTalks, the online video series of TED Conference talks, followed by TED.com, the TED Open Translation Project and the TED Open TV Project. Cohen also co-produces and co-hosts the TED Conference in California. A journalist by training, she was previously VP of Content at HotWired.com, the pioneering website from Wired magazine. In 1991, she launched the world's first networked multimedia magazine, at Stanford University.
Bruno Giussani, European Director, TED
Bruno is the European director of TED, the curator of the TEDGlobal and TED University programs, and the co-host of TEDGlobal. As a member of TED's senior team he participates in the development and implementation of TED's strategy globally. He's also a member of the boards of Swiss software company Tinext and of the Knight Fellowships at Stanford University. Previously, he has written for a number of publications in Europe and the US including the New York Times, the WSJE and the Swiss newsmagazine L'Hebdo; was in charge of online strategy at the World Economic Forum; and has co-founded three Internet companies.
Chee Pearlman
Journalist, conference creator and curator, Chee Pearlman has been a vital voice in the world of design for two decades. After a legendary stint as editor-in-chief of I.D. Magazine, she's now the director of Chee Company, a New York-based editorial and design consultancy, and the curator of the Curry Stone Design Prize, an annual $100,000 grant that recognizes designers creating social impact. As director of four conferences at the Art Center College of Design, she explored narratives such as "Serious Play," "Radical Craft" and "Stories from the Source." She was a 2011 Harvard Loeb Fellow, and is now developing a conference for 2012 in and about Detroit.
David Rockwell
David Rockwell does dramatic design, from the sleek interiors of Nobu and the W Hotels to the exuberant Mohegan Sun Casino, from the pop-tastic scenery for the Broadway musical Hairspray to the sublimely hilarious high-modern sets for Team America: World Police. He won the Presidential Design Award for his extraordinary work renovating New York's Grand Central Station, and his firm, the Rockwell Group, is designing the interior for the JetBlue terminal at New York's JFK Airport. Rockwell has published several books on his architectural and design process, including Pleasure and Spectacle -- two qualities that abound in his work.