Helen Marriage cofounded a company that specializes in creating disruptive, whole-city arts events that surprise and delight everyone who comes across them.

Why you should listen

Helen Marriage writes: "I am a producer of large-scale disruptive moments that place an artist's ideas in the heart of a city. I started life unsure of how to find a job and began helping a street theater company perform at the Edinburgh Festival. Only then did I realize that this could be a career. That was forty years ago. Since then, I've gone on to shut down central London and other cities with ephemeral events that transform people’s understanding of what a city is for and who controls it.

"I don't believe that cities are exclusively about shopping and traffic. Over the years I've developed a real sense of how artists can change the world, if only we make space for their vision. I guess that's my job -- to create a context in which the normal routines of daily life are disrupted for a moment to allow the public, especially those who know they’re not interested in anything the arts might have to say, to discover a new world we’d all like to live in."

Helen Marriage’s TED talk

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Showing off: Notes from Session 5 of TEDWomen 2018

November 30, 2018

The term “showing off” gets a bad rap. But for Session 5 of TEDWomen 2018, a lineup of speakers and performers reclaimed the phrase — showing off their talents, skills and whole extraordinary selves. Hosted by TED’s head of conferences, Kelly Stoetzel, and head of curation, Helen Walters, the talks ranged from architecture and the environment to education and grief, taking […]

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