Graham Hill
Graham is the founder of TreeHugger.com, an eco-blog that has been called “the Green CNN.” A previous TED Global speaker, his talks have praised the values of being a weekday vegetarian, and finding happiness in a less cluttered life. He is now the CEO of LifeEdited, and schemes daily about how he can help humanity avoid rapid extinction. Follow him at twitter.com/ghill.
Benjamin Barber
Dr. Benjamin R. Barber is an internationally-renowned political theorist, consulting regularly with political and civic leaders in the U.S. (President Clinton, Howard Dean) and around the world. Dr. Barber is a Senior Research Scholar at the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society at the CUNY Graduate Center, the Founder and President of the Interdependence Movement, and author of the international bestseller Jihad vs. McWorld and the upcoming If Mayors Ruled the World.
Brian Schechter
Brian Schechter is the co-founder and co-CEO of HowAboutWe.com, the first experience-driven dating and relationship brand. Recognizing the need for technology to facilitate authentic offline experiences, Schechter co-founded HowAboutWe in 2010 with his childhood best friend, Aaron Schildkrout, with the goal of creating a new way for people to find and sustain love in the modern world.
Hilary Mason
Hilary makes beautiful things with data. As the Chief Scientist at bitly, she studies attention on the internet in realtime, doing a mix of research, exploration, and engineering. She is also co-founder of HackNY, creator of dataists, and member of NYCResistor and Mayor Bloomberg’s Technology and Innovation Advisory Council. She is very curious.
Dong-Ping Wong
Dong-Ping Wong is a founding partner of Family, a NYC-based design firm focused on a more optimistic approach to ecological building. Family is dedicated to redefining architecture’s role in the consumption and production of energy, the optimization of valuable land, and the innovative application of natural resources. Ongoing projects include a floating, water-filtering pool for New York’s rivers named +Pool.
Matt Green
Matt Green has walked across the United States. After quitting his job as a civil engineer, Matt walked from Rockaway Beach, NY to Rockaway Beach, OR, documenting his journey through photos and stories on his blog. On December 31, 2011, Matt embarked on a new quest: to walk every block of every street in all five boroughs of New York City. He’ll be done some time in 2015.
Atim Oton
Atim Annette Oton is a Nigerian-born, American and British educated designer and the co-founder of Black Design News Network (BDNN), a flagship news distribution source and website creating awareness of black designers across the globe. She is the publisher and editor of Brooklyn’s Calabar Magazine, a publication about black Brooklyn culture and lifestyle, a blogger for Huffington Post Black Voices, and the former Associate Chair of Product Design at Parsons School of Design at The New School.
Panthea Lee
Panthea Lee is the co-founder of Reboot, a service design firm tackling social challenges worldwide. Working with organizations such as the World Bank, UNICEF, and Internews, her work focuses on the practical applications of ethnography, design, and technology in global governance and development. Panthea has led programs in over 20 countries, including Afghanistan, China, Egypt, and Sudan, in areas ranging from disaster relief to human trafficking.
Greg Lindsay
Greg Lindsay writes frequently about the intersection of urbanization and globalization. He is a contributing writer for Fast Company, a visiting scholar at New York University, an affiliate of the New England Complex Systems Institute, and an author of the international bestseller Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next. He’s also a two-time Jeopardy! champion and the only human to go undefeated against IBM’s Watson.
Paul Steely White
Since 2004, Paul has led Transportation Alternatives, New York City’s leading advocate for better bicycling, walking and public transportation. In 2011, Mr. White was selected to receive the Rockefeller Foundation’s Jane Jacobs Medal, which recognizes those whose creative uses of the urban environment build a more diverse, dynamic, and equitable city. Paul relishes his weekends, largely spent frolicking on the Brooklyn waterfront with his three year-old daughter Anna Jane.
Liz McEnaney
Liz McEnaney is co-founder of BLDG BLOK, a start-up that is creating a curated history of New York City. She has worked on exhibitions and cultural heritage projects that range in location from Staten Island to Maputo, Mozambique to New Delhi, India. Liz teaches in the Historic Preservation program at Columbia University, and is the former Executive Director of the Fitch Foundation.
Caroline Woolard
Caroline is an artist whose work lives where people gather – whether it’s the street, the subway, or the internet. She has also co-founded two barter initiatives for the creative community: OurGoods.org, a barter network for creative people, and Trade School, a learning space that runs on barter. She is a media coordinator for SolidarityNYC, a group that supports and promotes grassroots economic justice in NYC, a fellow at Eyebeam, and an adjunct professor at Parsons the New School for Design.
Jen Abrams
Jen Abrams is a co-founder of OurGoods.org, a barter network for creative people. She is also part of WOW Cafe Theater, a collectively-run theater space for women and transpeople, which has run on a barter/gift economy since its founding in 1980. Jen is an advocate for resource sharing in the NYC downtown dance community, and in her neighborhood of Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. She has managed small non-profits since 1994, and is an active choreographer and performance-maker.
Liz Nord
Culture blog Flavorpill called documentary filmmaker and multi-platform producer Liz Nord a “fierce, youthful visionary.” She is currently producing the transmedia project Jerusalem Unfiltered with web, mobile, live, and traditional film components. Past films include the critically acclaimed Jericho’s Echo: Punk Rock in the Holy Land, and a Haiti-based documentary for Wyclef Jean’s NGO. Liz also ran MTV’s Emmy Award-winning 2008 presidential election coverage.
Marcos Zotes
Marcos Zotes is founder and principal of UNSTABLE, a design and research laboratory that explores the social and political aspects of architecture in relation to the urban context. His work has been exhibited across the U.S. and Europe. Prior to UNSTABLE, Marcos worked as an architect at OMA in Rotterdam, CHORA in London, and Basalt in Reykjavik. He currently teaches at the Iceland Academy of the Arts.
