PROVIDENCE – The first four speakers of TEDxProvidence 2017 were announced Monday by the Providence Speaking Society.
The event, which will be held at the VETS Memorial Auditorium on Sept. 30, will feature U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Chanda Womack, Raymond Two Hawks Watson and Adeene Denton. The theme for this year’s conference is Past, Present, Future, with speakers focusing on “learning from the past, experiencing and influencing the present and creating the future.”
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TEDxProvidence has gathered over 60 speakers in annual day-long conferences since 2011.
Whitehouse has served as a U.S. Senator since 2006 and has been a member of the Budget, Judiciary, Environment and Public Works, Health Education Labor and Pensions Committees. He currently serves as the Ranking Member of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism and of the Environment and Public Works Subcommittee on Oversight.
Womack immigrated with her family to the United States in 1980 after being born in a refugee camp in Thailand. After attending public schools in Providence, Womack holds a B.A. degree and a Masters of Public Administration from the University of Rhode Island and a graduate certificate in Non-Profit Leadership from Rhode Island College. She currently serves as the president of the board of directors of the Cambodian Society of RI and co-chair of the board of directors of the Providence Youth Student Movement.
Watson is an artist, activist, educator and cultural practitioner who also has 10 years of experience in nonprofit executive administration. Watson received an Innovation Fellowship from the Rhode Island Foundation in 2016 for his project, the Providence Cultural Equity Initiative. The project seeks to encourage equitable embracement of different cultural communities in Rhode Island.
Denton is a scientist, historian and dancer interested in the ramifications of planetary exploration. She is in the process of completing her PhD in Planetary Science as a Presidential Fellow at Brown University.
TED is an organization that hosts conferences in various cities where individuals from a wide array of expertise and disciplines give short talks, nary longer than 20 minutes, about some idea or issue worth addressing. The talks are then posted online and frequently garner significant viewership.
Tickets are available at https://www.ppacri.org/events/detail/tedxprovidence-2017.
Kyle Borowski is a PBN contributing writer.
