In repurposing her wheelchair to create fantastical art, Sue Austin reshapes how we think about disability.

Actor Wendell Pierce ruminates on his performance of "Waiting for Godot" in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, highlighting the prophetic, transformative and rejuvenating powers of art in times of great strife.

Bassam Tariq is a blogger, a filmmaker, and a halal butcher -- but one thread unites his work: His joy in the diversity, the humanness of our individual experiences. In this charming talk, he shares clips from his film "These Birds Walk" and images from his tour of 30 mosques in 30 days -- and reminds us to consider the beautiful complexity with...

Alexa Meade takes an innovative approach to art. Not for her a life of sketching and stretching canvases. Instead, she selects a topic and then paints it--literally. She covers everything in a scene--people, chairs, food, you name it--in a mask of paint that mimics what's below it. In this eye-opening talk Meade shows off photographs of some of ...

What if your job didn't control your life? Brazilian CEO Ricardo Semler practices a radical form of corporate democracy, rethinking everything from board meetings to how workers report their vacation days (they don't have to). It's a vision that rewards the wisdom of workers, promotes work-life balance — and leads to some deep insight on what wo...

"The world needs you, badly," says legendary biologist E.O. Wilson in his letter to a young scientist. He gives advice collected from a lifetime of experience -- and reminds us that wonder and creativity are the center of the scientific life.

With a career that fuses rock and roll, corporate identity creation, and impressionistic geography, Paula Scher is a master conjurer of the instantly familiar.

Astronaut Dr. Mae Jemison‘s inclusive, audacious journey to improving life here on earth and beyond is paving the way for human interstellar travel.

Gary Vaynerchuk's Wine Library TV combines an irreverent approach to wine and a shrewd social media strategy. It won him web fame and the cachet to spin off book deals, new businesses and his own entrepreneurship consulting firm.

UPS’s David Lee works to create platforms that make it easier for people to turn fuzzy ideas into concrete solutions.

Cristina Domenech proposes to use language as an instrument of liberation and as a way to change the world.

LaToya Ruby Frazier focuses her camera lens on working class families, exploring themes of family, inequality, health care and environmental racism.

"The hood is good," says Jon Gray of the Bronx, New York-based creative collective Ghetto Gastro. Working at the intersection of food, design and art, Gray and his team honor the soul and history of their community while applying their unbridled creativity and expansive imagination to unexpected, otherworldly collaborations. Learn more about how...

With an outspoken approach to the problems of rebuilding cites and a fearless eye for design, Reed Kroloff is helping to change the urban landscape of cities from New York to New Orleans.

Liz Coleman radically remade Bennington College in the mid-1990s, in pursuit of a new vision: higher education as a performing art.

Bill Gross founded Idealab, an incubator of new inventions, ideas and businesses.

At the intersection of word and form, Marian Bantjes makes her art.

Bidding adieu to his last "real job" as Al Gore's speechwriter, Dan Pink went freelance to spark a right-brain revolution in the career marketplace.

We're on the edge of a new frontier in art and creativity -- and it's not human. Blaise Agüera y Arcas, principal scientist at Google, works with deep neural networks for machine perception and distributed learning. In this captivating demo, he shows how neural nets trained to recognize images can be run in reverse, to generate them. The results...

Seattle is a city celebrated globally for fostering artistic expression. Producer and arts advocate James Keblas tells the story of Seattle's evolution from conservative town to music capital, and offers advice for citizens looking to keep their local music scenes vibrant.

What does a bill like PIPA/SOPA mean to our shareable world? At the TED offices, Clay Shirky delivers a proper manifesto -- a call to defend our freedom to create, discuss, link and share, rather than passively consume.

A Juan Pablo Sáez Gil le encantan los palídromos. Tanto, que ha escrito un libro que se lee igual de principio al final que del final a principio. En esta charla lúdica nos cuenta sobre la magia de ver las cosas del revés.

As the creator of a large chunk of the Marvel Universe, Stan Lee knows a thing or two about conjuring new superheroes from thin air. In this instructional and charmingly idiosyncratic talk, Lee shares a few lessons on how to write your own superpowered characters and deploy them in stories that connect with the largest possible audience.

Imagine you're a shipwrecked sailor adrift in the enormous Pacific. You can choose one of three directions and save yourself and your shipmates -- but each choice comes with a fearful consequence too. How do you choose? In telling the story of the whaleship Essex, novelist Karen Thompson Walker shows how fear propels imagination, as it forces us...

What if building intelligent systems and innovations was as easy as drawing connections on a computer screen? Joachim Horn has made this possible. His toolkit puts the brainpower and experience of engineers in the hands of anyone interested in experimenting with new ideas and inventions. He enables anyone with imagination to go from idea to prot...

iPad storyteller Joe Sabia introduces us to Lothar Meggendorfer, who created a bold technology for storytelling: the pop-up book. Sabia shows how new technology has always helped us tell our own stories, from the walls of caves to his own onstage iPad.

Bill Gross has founded a lot of start-ups, and incubated many others -- and he got curious about why some succeeded and others failed. So he gathered data from hundreds of companies, his own and other people's, and ranked each company on five key factors. He found one factor that stands out from the others -- and surprised even him.

Okorafor’s gripping account of her recovery will inspire any reader.

The euphonium, with its sweet brass sound, is rarely heard outside of traditional brass bands. Cutting loose on the euph, prodigy Matthew White performs Nat McIntosh's hip-hop-inflected "The Warrior Comes Out to Play."

With scissors and paper, artist Béatrice Coron creates intricate worlds, cities and countries, heavens and hells. Striding onstage in a glorious cape cut from Tyvek, she describes her creative process and the way her stories develop from snips and slices.