UNC

Confirmed Speakers

• Alexander Julian
  Alexander Julian was practically born in a clothing store in Chapel Hill NC. His parents are described as “the Godparents of Preppy”. He has won every major award in fashion design, textile design and in furniture design. He has been voted to the International Best Dressed List 9 times. He has been honored by both Pantone and International Color Marketing. UNC ’69, he received a Distinguished Alumni Award in ’88. He is the first Fashion designer to design his own fabrics, design Professional sports teams’ uniforms, design college sports uniforms (Tarheel basketball), and design college graduation regalia (UNC). He has 6 children, 4 of whom are Tarheels. Dedicated to elevating the ordinary, Julian is a protagonist for aesthetic entertainment. His overall mission is to create products that help you “feel at home in the world”.
• Andrea Reusing
  Chef Andrea Reusing collaborates with small farms in her marriage of North Carolina ingredients and Asian flavors at her Chapel Hill, NC restaurant, Lantern. Since opening in 2002 it has been named one of “America’s Top 50 Restaurants” and “best farm-to-table restaurants” by Gourmet, as one of “America’s 50 Most Amazing Wine Experiences” by Food & Wine and as “Restaurant of the Year” in 2009 by The News & Observer. Reusing is the 2011 winner of the James Beard award for Best Chef: Southeast. She serves on the boards of the Center of Environmental Farming Systems, Chefs Collaborative and was recently appointed by Governor Beverly Perdue to the Sustainable Local Food Advisory Council. Reusing’s first book, Cooking in the Moment: A Year of Seasonal Recipes, was named one of 2011’s most notable cookbooks by the New York Times.
• Carolina Chocolate Drops
  With their 2010 Nonesuch debut, Genuine Negro Jig—which garnered a Best Traditional Folk Album Grammy last year—the Carolina Chocolate Drops proved that the old-time, fiddle and banjo-based music they’d so scrupulously researched and passionately performed could be a living, breathing, ever-evolving sound. Starting with material culled from the Piedmont region of the Carolinas, they sought to freshly interpret this work, not merely recreate it, highlighting the central role African-Americans played in shaping our nation’s popular music from its beginnings more than a century ago. The virtuosic trio’s approach was provocative and revelatory. Their concerts, The New York Times declared, were “an end-to-end display of excellence… They dip into styles of Southern black music from the 1920s and ’30s—string-band music, jug-band music, fife and drum, early jazz—and beam their curiosity outward. They make short work of their instructive mission and spend their energy on things that require it: flatfoot dancing, jug playing, shouting.”
• Corey Ford
  Corey Ford is the CEO of Matter Ventures, a $2.5 million incubator and start-up accelerator launched by Public Radio Exchange (PRX) and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to spur innovation in public media. He most recently built Runway, a pre-team, pre-idea incubator for entrepreneurs at Innovation Endeavors, Google chairman Eric Schmidt’s venture capital fund. Prior to that, he taught design thinking innovation at the Institute of Design at Stanford University. Corey began his career in public broadcasting managing the production of 17 films for the PBS/WGBH series FRONTLINE, earning an Emmy and a duPont-Columbia Gold Baton Award. He earned an MBA at Stanford and was a Morehead Scholar at UNC-Chapel Hill where he majored in Journalism and International Studies.
• Jane Thraikill
  Jane F. Thrailkill is Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Term Associate Professor at UNC-Chapel Hill. She teaches American literature, critical theory, and medical humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, where she also serves as Director of Graduate Admissions for English. Her first book, Affecting Fictions: Mind, Body, and Emotion in American Literary Realism (Harvard UP, 2007), examines the influence of modern neurology on the nineteenth-century novel. Her articles on the intersections of science, philosophy, medicine, and literature have appeared in Neurology and Modernity, English Literary History, Journal of Narrative Theory, American Literature, and Poetics Today. Currently, she is collaborating with faculty in Anthropology, Journalism, and Social Medicine to create interdisciplinary courses for a new graduate program in Literature, Medicine, and Culture at UNC.
• Kevin Guskiewicz
  Kevin Guskiewicz is the Kenan Distinguished Professor, Co-Director of the Matthew Gfeller Sport-Related TBI Research Center, and Director of the Center for the Study of Retired Athletes at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Over the past 18 years, his clinical research program has investigated the effect of sport-related concussion on balance and cognitive function, the biomechanics of sport concussion, and the long-term neurological effects of concussion in professional football players. Dr. Guskiewicz has received 24 funded research grants, and published over 130 journal articles and 8 textbook chapters on sport concussion. Additionally, he has presented over 250 national and international lectures on this topic. He teaches courses in sports medicine, anatomy, and research methods at UNC, and has been awarded fellowship in the American College of Sports Medicine, National Academy of Kinesiology, and the National Athletic Trainers’ Association. He serves on NCAA’s Concussion Committee, NFL’s Head, Neck, and Spine Committee, and NFLPA’s Mackey-White Committee. In 2011, Kevin was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship.
• Sajan George
  Sajan is the Founder & CEO of Matchbook Learning, a national non-profit school turnaround management organization that has designed and implemented a unique blended model of school, the only one of its kind targeting turnaround (i.e. bottom 5%) public schools that blends face-to-face and virtual instruction. Sajan started working in Detroit to bring our teacher-centric blended model of school to turnaround some of the nation’s most neediest schools. His blended turnaround model design has won numerous national awards and recognition. Prior to founding Matchbook Learning, CEO Sajan George was a Managing Director with Alvarez & Marsal (“A&M”) where he led the Firm’s Education Practice. Sajan has experience running entire K-12 public school districts, employing Lead Turnaround Partner tactics across major urban cities and precedent setting reform efforts from St Louis (2004 – first ever district to contract out its entire management to a private management firm), to New Orleans (well chronicled successful post‐Katrina success within days after the levees historically broke – 2005 & 2006) to New York City (well chronicled turnaround and Broad Prize winner for the most improved school district in the country after our work completed in 2007) to Washington, DC (2008 – historic mayoral takeover, appointment of Michelle Rhee whom we worked closely with) to Detroit (2009 & 2010 – historic State takeover and appointment of Emergency Fiscal Manager).
• Stirling Little
  Stirling Little is a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill double majoring in communication studies and journalism. He is the founder and co-president of the video game club, UNC Chapel Hill E-Sports. Stirling’s hope is to go into video game academia and maybe help games grow past being violence-based power fantasies and disposable toys. He won TEDxUNC’s student speaker contest, beating out dozens of other students for an opportunity to deliver his talk onstage in Memorial Hall.
• Theaster Gates
  Theaster Gates has developed an expanded artistic practice that includes space development, object making, performance and critical engagement with many publics. Recent exhibition and performance venues include Locust Projects, the Seattle Art Museum, Art Basel, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Milwaukee Art Museum, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and the Whitney Biennial in New York. Gates’ upcoming exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago extends the work he conceived for dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel, Germany. In 2012, Gates was awarded the inaugural Vera List Center Prize for Art and Politics, honored by the Wall Street Journal as Arts Innovator of the Year, and became a USA Fellow. Gates has also received awards and grants from Creative Capital, the Joyce Foundation, Graham Foundation, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and Artadia. He is represented by Kavi Gupta Gallery in Chicago and White Cube in London.