Morning Session
The Physical City : Janette Sadik-Khan, Principal, Bloomberg Associates
The Healthy City : Andrew Solomon, Author, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
The Cultural City : Jeff Chang, Executive Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University
The Educated City : Nadia Lopez, Principal, Mott Hall Bridges Academy
The Entrepreneurial City: Douglas Rushkoff, Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at CUNY/Queens
Evening Session
Shared Keynote: Yaa Gyasi, Author, Homegoing
Speaker Bios
Janette Sadik-Khan is one of the world’s foremost authorities on transportation and urban transformation. She served as New York City’s transportation commissioner from 2007 to 2013 under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, overseeing historic changes including building nearly 400 miles of bike lanes and creating more than 60 plazas citywide. A founding principal with Bloomberg Associates, she works with mayors around the world to reimagine and redesign their cities.
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Andrew Solomon is a writer whose books and essays explore the subjects of politics, culture and psychology with extraordinary humanity. He received the National Book Award for The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression. The book was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and is widely considered the definitive text on depression. His other works include Far From the Tree: Parents, Children & the Search for Identity, and a collection of essays, Far and Away.
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Jeff Chang has written extensively on culture, politics, the arts, and music. He has published several award-winning books, including Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, Who We Be: A Cultural History of Race in Post-Civil Rights America, and We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation. Jeff co-founded CultureStr/ke and ColorLines and has written for The Guardian, Slate, the New York Times, Mother Jones, and many others.
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Nadia Lopez is the founder and principal of Mott Hall Bridges Academy in Brownsville, Brooklyn and a finalist for the 2016 Global Teachers Prize. She founded Mott Hall Bridges Academy in 2010 to help turn the tide in a neighborhood that had all but given up on its students. Despite the fact that all of Nadia’s students live below the poverty line, her school combats the school-to-prison pipeline with a stunning 98% graduation rate among its first three graduating classes.
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Douglas Rushkoff is a writer, documentarian, and lecturer whose work focuses on human autonomy in a digital age. He is the author of fifteen bestselling books on media, technology, and society, including Program or Be Programmed, Present Shock, and Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus. He’s also made award-winning PBS Frontline documentaries, such as Generation Like, and authored several graphic novels, like Testament and Aleister & Adolf.
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Yaa Gyasi is the author of the highly acclaimed debut novel Homegoing and a recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 2016 “5 Under 35” Award. Gyasi was born in Ghana and raised in Huntsville, Alabama. She holds a BA in English from Stanford University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she held a Dean’s Graduate Research Fellowship. She lives in New York City.