Theme: Nature

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized (subject to certain rules and regulations).

Salomon
75 Waterman St
Providence, Rhode Island, 02912
United States

Isaiah Paik

Isaiah Paik is an internet politician, an independent musical artist, and an undergraduate Sociology concentrator at Brown. In one year, his passionately progressive political advocacy has gathered 60,000 followers to his TikTok page (@paik4president). Isaiah has previously performed journalism work with his local NPR affiliate, and currently performs geographic analysis of historical archives for the Brown Population Studies and Training Center. In his self-published academic analyses, songs, and videos, Isaiah represents a new wave of political youth advocacy, with millions of views and likes to his name.

Zoë Balestri

Zoë Balestri is a Brown ‘22 undergraduate activist, writer, farmer, and filmmaker, studying Literary Arts and developing an Independent Concentration in agricultural Humanities. An aspiring screenwriter, she is the Head of Production for Brown Motion Pictures. In 2020, she was awarded the Kim Ann Arstark Memorial for the best poem by an undergraduate or graduate student. Zoë became an activist for reproductive rights in high school when she designed and modeled a dress she fashioned from condoms and Planned Parenthood stickers, garnering accolades from Cosmopolitan and Teen Vogue as well as the attention of Breitbart. A city-dwelling Manhattanite, she has worked summers since age nine on a third-generation, women-run dairy farm in rural Pennsylvania where she learned about heifer midwifery and pasture rotations and developed her passion for animal husbandry, sustainable agriculture, and the workforce that sustains its increasingly fragile way of life. Through her writing, farm work, and studies, she examines how policy, politics, and culture can repair both rural communities and humanity’s ethically fraught relationships to animals and the earth.