“Creative” communities are our future! TEDxFullerton began the conversation about what is means to be a “creative” community. What were the “ideas worth spreading in Orange County” which would achieve this goal?

 “I believe that creativity will be the currency of the 21st century.” Gerald Gordon, Ph.D., President/CEO, Fairfax County Economic Development Authority

 “Human creativity has become an essential economic driver.” Moving Forward, Canada Council for the Arts, Strategic Plan 2008-2011

 “The innovative cities of the coming age will develop a creative union of technology, arts and civics.” Sir Peter Hall, renowned geographer and authority on the economic, demographic, cultural and management issues facing cities...

Fullerton, California
United States

Kimberly Brooks

KIMBERLY BROOKS is an contemporary American painter and new media artist. Brooks' work is collected internationally and has been featured in over forty publications worldwide including Art Ltd., The LA Times, Vanity Fair, Vogue (Spain), Elle, Pen (Japan) and New American Paintings. She has also been showcased in numerous juried exhibitions including curators from Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, California Institute of the Arts and LACMA. Brooks started her career as a new media artist. She founded an award-winning collaborative for artists/designers and engineers called Lightray which has designed and launched major interactive projects for Apple, NASA, Intel, Warner Music, and many others. Aside from painting she delivers lectures and presentations to museums, universities and organizations on a range of subjects including "The Creative Process in Eight Stages", "The Technology of Exhibitionism", and "The Art of the Internet". Author over eighty essays and artist interviews, Kimberly Brooks recently conceived of and launched the Arts Section of the Huffington Post where she serves as Arts Editor. Her artwork is represented by Taylor De Cordoba in Culver City, California.

Shaheen Sadeghi

SHAHEEN SADEGHI built a highly successful career in the retail and fashion industry most recently as President, surfing giant Quiksilver, and has now made waves in retail, commercial real estate by creating highly successful recycled and green community centers. As Founder, CEO of Lab Holding, LLC, he conceived and built the LAB Anti-Mall, a renowned OC retail destination, transforming an abandoned military night-vision goggle factory into a lively, arts oriented retail, restaurant mecca for urban youth. The LAB continues to garner international acclaim from such luminaries as the BBC, New York Times, USA Today, NPR, Boston Globe, London Financial Times, the LA Times. In 2002 the CAMP retail complex opened its doors, showcasing sustainable and human powered retailers and restaurants in a pioneering, green building. Current projects include: (1) a sustainable “neighborhood of the arts” within SoBeCa, (2) a culinary and sustainable project, “Playa Del Norte”, in San Clemente, CA, (3) a LEED certified culinary center, SEED @ Centennial Mills, at the edge of Portland’s famous Pearl District. He’s spoken at TED, consulted to Fortune 500 companies: General Motors, Nortel, Volkswagen, McDonald’s and Nestle, been listed in “the O.C.’s top 101”, the L.A. fashion industry’s “Top 25”, O.C.’s Hot 25, received Hall of Fame award for Community Revitalization. In support of emerging and student artists, Shaheen designed the ARTery gallery, originated the KIN program, IDEAS scholarship and the OC/DC (Orange County Design Collective) Charity event benefiting CHOC. Shaheen is a graduate of Pratt Institute, New York City.

Andrea Harris-McGee

ANDREA HARRIS-MCGEE was born in San Francisco, CA and moved to Orange County in 1994. She received a B.A. in 1996 from the College of Art and Design in Laguna Beach, CA. Andrea worked as an art dealer from age 18 and moved to Paris, France in 2000. With a background in exhibition design, museum studies, graphic design, and non-profit development she became a Museum Preparator and later Registrar of collections and Administrator for the Laguna Art Museum. She moved on to become the first director for CSUF Grand Central Art Center, 1998-2008. While curating and coordinating more than 300 exhibitions with the Art Center, she also hosted 32 artists-in-residences, published 25 exhibition publications through Grand Central Press. She has also coordinated programming and taught through the GCAC After School Outreach Programs for high school students in Santa Ana for five years and also mentors students. In 2008, she became the director of Orange Coast College Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion in Costa Mesa, CA. In her time at OCC, she continues to curate exhibits that inspire the students and public. She has developed and presented nine major exhibitions and published exhibition publications through the Arts Pavilion Press. Andrea is a member of the Grand Central Arts Forum and co-owner of Watermark Printmaking Workshop and Gallery in Santa Ana, CA.

Jill Anjuli Hansen

JILL ANJULI HANSEN, a visionary of the young generation of creatives, is an artist and athlete to say the least. A surfing classicist, she grew up surfing in Waikiki, Hawaii, same place as the DUKE and ROYALTY of Hawaii. Trained in the arts of ballet, hula, painting, sketching, fashion her entire life, she made the journey across the Pacific to California. Doubling as a competitive surfer and professional model as a teen and twenties, her work included runway shows, photo shoots, surfing tradeshows, autograph signings and events. Pursuing her goal as a designer, she attended FIDM to put the experience behind the brand. Internationally traveled, surfing gave her a contacts list, relationship network and business foundation of which to launch her brand. Candy Wetsuits came out 2010 internationally and is now published in Japan, Australia, THE UK and THE US. Upcoming projects include TV show about the brand and film for film festival submission. The brand has an interactive blog featuring art, surfing, the family behind the brand and today's youth culture - www.shredtilurdead.tumblr.com.

Karen Atkinson

KAREN ATKINSON is a media, installation and public artist, independent curator and collaborator. She has exhibited and curated internationally and throughout the US including the Fifth Havana Biennial in Cuba, Australia, Europe, South Africa, Canada and South America. She was a co-founding director of Side Street Projects in 1991, a nonprofit artist-run organization in Los Angeles which is still thriving today. Atkinson has been a faculty member at CalArts since 1988. She is a past president of the National Association of Artists' Organizations and has served on many advisory boards of arts organizations. She spearheads GYST Ink, an artist-run organization providing information, technology and solutions created by artists for artists, which is an ongoing art project as well as a socially based hybrid organization. http://www.gyst-ink.com.

Matthew Jenusaitis

MATTHEW JENUSAITIS is President and CEO of OCTANe, an Orange County, CA non-profit focused on catalyzing innovation, starting new medical and high technology companies, creating jobs. Matthew is an experienced medical device industry professional with 25+ years of engineering, sales, marketing, and executive level GM experience. Before OCTANe, Mr. Jenusaitis worked with the venture backed accelerator fund, ConcepTx,. Prior to ConcepTx, Matthew was an “Executive in Residence”, private equity firm Warburg Pincus, LLC. This led to Matthew to assume the role of President, ev3 Neurovasuclar, one of Warburg’s portfolio companies. Matthew led their growing division (formerly MicroTherapeutics Inc., now a wholly-owned company subsidiary) through a combination of organizational development activities, and launched, developed markets for a number of new products, including the Axium® Embolization Coil and the Onyx® Liquid Embolic System. Prior to ev3, Matthew spent 15 years at Boston Scientific Corp., his most recent position, President of the $600 Million Peripheral Interventions Division (formerly Medi-Tech). Matthew is Chairman, Board of Directors, Avantis Medical, Sunnyvale, CA, and sits on the boards of Neuro Interventional Therapeutics, Pittsburgh, PA and Creagh Medica, Galway, Ireland and the advisory boards, Cornell’s School of Biomedical Engineering, Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences, and University of California Bren School of Information and Computer Science. Jenusaitis holds a BA, chemical engineering cum laude from Cornell University, MS, bio-chemical engineering, Arizona State University and an MBA, UCI.

Adam Leipzig

ADAM LEIPZIG has been involved as a producer, distributor or supervising executive on over 25 films as diverse as Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Dead Poets Society, Titus and March of the Penguins, and has worked with notable directors at early points in their careers – including the first films directed by Jon Turteltaub, Julie Taymor, Joe Johnston and Cherien Dabis, and the first plays directed by Robert Altman. As President of National Geographic Films, he established the company with acquisitions, distribution and original productions, and lead a team to raise $100 million in financing. He has also been an executive with Walt Disney Studios, PolyGram/Interscope and has worked independently. As both a producer and dramaturg for the Los Angeles Theatre Center, and one of its founders, he produced and supervised more than 300 music and dance concerts and performance art events, and produced the early works of then-emerging playwrights Jon Robin Baitz, David Henry Hwang, Donald Freed, Reza Abdoh, Marlane Meyer, Charles Marowitz, Mabou Mines, William Mastrosimone, Michael Frayn, Steve Carter, and Miguel Piñero. His articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Screen International, Written By, and American Theater.

Joseph Jewell

DR. JOSEPH JEWELL, a man equally at home in the classical and modern idioms, can be found performing as a featured jazz soloist at the State University of New York Jazz Guitar Festival the week after performing the concert music of Chinese Composer Tan Dun at the La Jolla Chamber Music Festival. In 2003, Joe completed the Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Jazz Guitar Performance at the University of Southern California where he was Pi Kappa Lambda's Outstanding Doctoral Graduate. Recognized as an accomplished orchestral guitarist, Joe has performed with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and many other prominent orchestras. In 2007, Dr. Jewell played guitar and banjo on the Los Angeles Opera's production of Kurt Weill's "The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny." In 2008, the recording of this production went on to win Grammy awards for Best Classical Recording and Best Opera Recording. Joe’s studio credits include performances on soundtracks for television shows, feature films, and numerous recordings as a leader and sideman. He has performed in the pit orchestras of over 200 musical theater productions. Dr. Jewell is currently Associate Professor of Guitar and Commercial Music Studies at Fullerton College.

Amy Caterina

AMY CATERINA was born in 1973, in Niagara Falls, NY. Caterina received her MFA in Photography in 2002 California State University Fullerton. In 2002, Caterina co-founded Rat Powered Films with fellow artist Bob Pece, an organization dedicated to the presentation of art films from around the globe. In 2005, Caterina started knitting and began Pseudo-Sod, a series that quickly emerged as a major component in her evolving oeuvre of mixed media installations. She was an artist-in-residence at the Huntington Beach Art Center. She displayed mixed media knitted “grass” covered deer and moose, beside cemetery plot sized sections of “grass.” The Pseudo-Sod car cover was also photographed in various locations throughout Orange County. In 2008, Caterina was the artist-in-residence at the CSUF Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana, California, opening her first solo exhibition titled, “This used to be real estate, now it's only fields and trees.” She currently teaches filmmaking, digital arts and photography, and art history at several Southern CA colleges and also works as a freelance curator. In July, Caterina was a resident artist at the Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, CA. She will be exhibiting this fall in Pomona, Costa Mesa, and Los Angeles. Spring 2011, she will be a visiting artist at the Northern Illinois University Art Museum, and an artist-in-residence at Coastline College, Costa Mesa, CA.

John Crawford

JOHN CRAWFORD is an intermedia artist, interactive performance director, technology developer and interaction designer. Intersecting software with digital media and theatrical performance, he uses computers and video to create painterly animations and motion graphics closely integrated with dance. His projects explore embodied interaction, combining processed video and digital animation with motion capture, real-time motion tracking, image processing and telepresence. He originated the Active Space concept in 1994 to describe his intermedia performance systems that produce visuals and music in response to movement. He is Associate Professor of Dance and Media Arts at University of California Irvine, where he directs the Embodied Media Performance Technology Lab and the campus-wide Digital Arts Minor program. His course offerings include dance filmmaking, telepresence & interactive performance, motion capture, and digital media art fundamentals. He founded the eMedia Studio, a distributed arts collaboratory at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, where he is a frequent participant in transdisciplinary research projects connecting performing arts and digital media practices with engineering and computer science. In 2006-08 he was a Visiting Research Professor at Beijing Dance Academy in China, and currently he is Director of Media Arts at the annual summer International Contemporary Arts Festival in Andalusia, Spain. As a software developer, his credits include projects for Adobe, Microsoft and other companies. As a theatre director and actor, he studied with Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York.

Bruce Babad

BRUCE BABAD (b'BAD) is Coordinator of Jazz Studies at Fullerton College and is a freelance woodwind musician (saxophones, flutes & clarinet) in Los Angeles. Currently Bruce can be seen and heard with the Grammy Award winning Bill Holman Band, Les Hooper Band, The Cannonball/Coltrane Project as well as his own quartet. Babad's latest project is a "Tribute To Paul Desmond". Bruce has performed and/or recorded with jazz legends; Dizzy Gillespie, Joe Williams, Mark Murphy, Mel Lewis, as well as Rock and Roll Hall of Fame groups; The Four Tops, The Platters, The Spinners, Little Milton, Barry Manilow, and classical phenomenon, Gabriela Montero. Bruce has also performed with Elvis Presley - but that is a very different story.

Monica Enlee Lee

DR. MONICA ENHEE LEE oversees the Certificate in Piano Teaching program, piano performance majors as well as beginning, intermediate and advanced class pianos. Before accepting her current position at Fullerton College in 2000, Dr. Lee has served on the piano faculties of Prince Georges Community College, Concordia University, and Northwestern University. As a pianist, she performed solo and orchestral pieces throughout the United States, Korea and Russia. For the past fifteen years Dr. Lee has adjudicated various competitions throughout U.S. and Canada. Through her Certificate in Piano Teaching program, the music department received over $200,000 VTEA funding to purchase grand and upright pianos in 2007. Dr. Lee continues to provide some of the best instruments for the program. Acquisition of Yamaha’s AvantGrand N2s in 2010 marks the Fullerton College the first institution in nation to own the new hybrid pianos. Miss Lee is currently the chair of the Annual Piano Ensemble Festival, District Coordinator of CAPMT and an active member of RCM College of Examiners since 2009. She was appointed 2005-2007 member of the Community Advisory Council for Higher Education for the 56th District. Miss Lee received her DMA from Northwestern University, MM from Maryland University and BM and premed from University of Oklahoma.

Steve Nalepa

STEVE NALEPA is a producer, professor and mad scientist collector based in Los Angeles. An electronic musician revered in avant-garde circles for his studio alchemy and genre bending, he’s produced tracks with such legends as Bill Laswell and Pharoah Sanders, performed with the LA Philharmonic at Walt Disney Concert Hall, and shared the stage with some of the most revered electronic musicians and video artists in the world. Nalepa is one of 100 artists featured in the acclaimed “Visionaire 53: Sound,” his music joining original pieces from David Byrne, Lalo Schifrin, U2 and more on five 12” vinyl record picture discs packaged with a portable record player inside a specially produced domed case. Born in raised in Chicago, Nalepa graduated from Yale University with a degree in Mathematics and Economics and a spot on the Academic All-Ivy Football Team. He headed west and taught high school math and science, worked as a paranormal news researcher, and launched the award-winning art book publishing company Dilettane Press while continuing to develop his music. When he’s not in the lab, scoring films or rocking dancefloors, Nalepa can be found inspiring the students in his music technology classes at Chapman University Conservatory of Music.

Markus Burger

MARKUS BURGER German-born jazz pianist, composer, former label executive, music educator and consultant.His music has been performed in Europe, the former Soviet Union, Africa, and most recently in the United States. He began studying piano at age six and later earned his Masters in Performing Arts from the Essen Folkwang School in Germany, a B.A. in Piano and Composition from the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands and a Certification in Popular Music from the University of Hamburg, Germany. He studied with Peter Schmalfuss, Georg Ruby, Simon Nabatov, Peter Walter, John Taylor, Kenny Wheeler and Kenny Werner. In developing his signature sound over the years, Markus drew his influences from a wide range of musical styles including J.S. Bach, Claude Debussy, Keith Jarrett, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Pat Metheny, Lyle Mays, Elton John, Stevie Wonder and Sting.He released 13 albums as a leader and countless others as producer.