Eve Blossom is the Founder and CEO of Lulan Artisans, designers and producers of sustainable textiles that elegantly merge original contemporary designs with centuries-old weaving techniques. She works in partnership with more than 800 weavers, spinners, dyers and finishers - in small workshops in Cambodia, India, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam.

Blossom seeks to empower these artisans through an economic engine and celebrate their spirit, talents and traditions - giving them a stronger voice for their future. Lulan Artisans integrates Blossom's design sensibilities with her yearning to create social change and the company is charting new territory as a for-profit social venture. Lulan works closely with these individuals, paying sustainable wages, creating economic stability, growing local economies and assisting in other social benefits - such as education, housing, healthcare - as well as opening up new markets for their products.

Frequent lecturer on design and social change, trained-architect Eve Blossom is not only committed to environmentally responsible design, she is also intent on changing business methodologies to create economic options for artisans whether in Southeast Asia or in the U.S. She received her Masters in Architecture from Tulane University and has undertaken graduate studies in Business Administration. Read Less

Frans Johansson is an entrepreneur and thought leader. He is also a consultant and the managing director for a hedge fund. Frans previously co-founded and managed two companies, a Boston-based software company and a medical device company operating out of Baltimore, Maryland and Stockholm, Sweden.

Raised in Sweden by his African-American and Cherokee mother and Swedish father, Frans earned an MBA at Harvard Business School and a BS in environmental science at Brown University.

A successful author, Frans has written on a variety of topics, from business management to healthcare to sport fishing to how to save our oceans. His bestselling book, The Medici Effect, has been translated into 17 languages and was named "One of the Ten Best Business Books of 2004" by Amazon.com. Read Less

Fred Wilson has been a venture capitalist since 1987. He currently is a managing partner at Union Square Ventures and also founded Flatiron Partners. Fred has a Bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering from MIT and an MBA from The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. Fred is married with three kids and lives in New York City. Read Less

Jack Dorsey is the Creator, Co-founder, and Chairman of Twitter, Inc. Originally from St. Louis, Jack's early fascination for mass-transit and how cities function led him to Manhattan and programming real-time messaging systems for couriers, taxis, and emergency vehicles. Throughout this work Jack witnessed thousands of workers in the field constantly updating where they were and what they were doing; Twitter is a constrained simplification designed for general usage and extended by the millions of people who make it their own every day. Jack is dedicated to creating public goods which foster approachability, immediacy, and transparency, and is starting a second company focused on bringing these concepts to commerce. Read Less

Jay O'Callahan has performed at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, National Theatre Complex in London, the Olympics, Lincoln Center, Boston Symphony Orchestra and in venues in Africa, New Zealand, Canada, Germany and China. The Associated Press trumpeted him as "a theater troupe inside one body." Time Magazine dubbed Jay "a genius."

Jay writes the plays he performs. The hallmark of his talent is the passion he brings to big and small dramas of ordinary life. He slips into the souls of his characters and captures the wonder and sparkling sense of life welled up inside them, creating a magical world of hope, courage and dignity.

With the sweep of a hand, the flex of a muscle or the hushed click of a word, Jay gives voice to the small town clerk in Village Heroes, the puzzled son coming to terms with his father in The Dance, or the young woman growing up in Nova Scotia during World War II in The Herring Shed.

Jay has just completed creating Forged in the Stars, a story commissioned by NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) for their 50th anniversary. He is currently performing it at NASA locations around the country. Jay is working on a story commissioned by the town of Jonesborough, Tennessee and the National Storytelling Network. It will be completed the fall of 2010. Other commissioned works include: The Myth of Billy the Kid (National Public Radio), The Spirit of the Great Auk (Quebec Labrador Foundation), Peer Gynt and the Hary Janos Suite (Boston Symphony Orchestra), Edna Robinson (Town of Harvard, Massachusetts for their 250th anniversary), The Bread and Roses Strike (Massachusetts State Department of Environmental Management), Pouring the Sun (Lehigh University), and Father Joe (College of the Holy Cross).

The National Endowment of the Arts awarded him a fellowship for solo performance excellence. Jay has received awards for his performances, books, audiotapes and videos from the National Education Film Festival, Fund for U.S. Artists at International Festivals, Parents' Choice, NAPPA, New England Theater Conference and UNESCO, to name a few. He also is a regular contributor to National Public Radio and leads creativity workshops for corporations and other interested groups. Read Less

John Maeda is a world-renowned artist, graphic designer, computer scientist and educator whose career reflects his philosophy of humanizing technology. For more than a decade, he has worked to synthesize technology, education and the arts into a 21st-century model for creativity and innovation.

As president of Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), a position he assumed in June, 2008, Maeda champions the vital role artists and designers play in fueling our contemporary creative economy. He sees RISD's emphasis on critical thinking and critical making - on making tangible objects by hand - as increasingly relevant in an overly digital world. As president, he is working to connect RISD to the political, economic, social and business spheres - areas where the untapped potential of artists and designers can make a difference. To ensure the broadest possible access to a RISD education, he has also made fundraising for scholarships a top priority.

Maeda's early work redefined the use of electronic media as a tool for expression by combining skilled computer programming with traditional artistic technique. This laid the groundwork for the interactive motion graphics that are prevalent on the web today. As a digital artist, Maeda has exhibited in well-received one-man shows in London, New York and Paris. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Cartier Foundation in Paris. He is a trustee of the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and currently serves as a Director for PopTech and on the Design Advisory Board for Proctor & Gamble. He has also designed advanced commercial projects for major corporations such as Cartier, Google, Philips, Reebok and Samsung, among others.

In 2008 Esquire magazine named Maeda one of the 75 most influential people of the 21st century. In 2001 he earned a National Design Award in the US; in 2002, the Mainichi Design Prize in Japan; and in 2005, the Raymond Loewy Foundation Prize in Germany.

A former professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Maeda taught media arts and sciences there for 12 years and served as associate director of research at the MIT Media Lab. He has published four books, with his most recent, The Laws of Simplicity, now translated into 14 languages. Maeda has lectured widely, including at Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, the Royal College of Art, Stanford and UCLA; at the Centre Pompidou, TED conferences and Walker Art Center; and for corporations such as Herman Miller, Sony, Steelcase, Toshiba and Yahoo!.

A native of Seattle, WA, Maeda earned both a bachelor's and a master's degree in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from MIT, followed by a PhD in Design Science from the University of Tsukuba Institute of Art and Design in Japan and an MBA from Arizona State University. Read Less

Leslie Koch is president of the Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation (GIPEC). Governors Island is a 172 acre island in the heart of New York Harbor that includes a 92 acre National Historic Landmark District with historic buildings, fortifications, and open spaces. Appointed by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Governor George E. Pataki in April 2006, Ms. Koch is responsible for the planning, redevelopment and on-going operation of 150 acres of the Island. Under her leadership, GIPEC has developed a strategy to create world-class open spaces on the Island, expand public access and early signature uses, preserve historic structures and improve the Island's transportation and infrastructure, and plan for mixed-use public and private development over a multi-year, multi-phase process. This strategy is helping to transform Governors Island into a destination with great public open space, as well as education and other facilities.

Prior to GIPEC, Leslie Koch was the CEO of the Fund for Public Schools, the nonprofit organization affiliated with the New York City Department of Education where she developed initiatives to increase public participation and private sector support for public education in New York City. Under her leadership, the Fund secured nearly $160 million for system-wide initiatives and school-based programs.

A native New Yorker, Ms. Koch began her career in the NYC government and since that time, her career has spanned all three sectors. As an executive with Microsoft, she was responsible for strategic development and marketing of several flagship products. Ms. Koch also served as a consultant and board member for a variety of organizations. She graduated summa cum laude from Yale College with a B.A. in history and received a Masters in Public and Private Management from the Yale School of Management. Read Less

Martin Ping is the Executive Director of Hawthorne Valley Association, a nonprofit corporation promoting social and cultural renewal through the integration of education, agriculture and the arts.

The Hawthorne Valley Association is located in Columbia County in New York's Hudson Valley and includes Hawthorne Valley Farm, a 400-acre biodynamic farm. A holistic approach to sustainable living, biodynamic farming develops the earth, plants, and animals in concert to create a self-nourishing system that produces no unused waste and employs no artificial chemicals.

The Hawthorne Valley Farm encompasses a full dairy herd, with onsite dairy processing, CSA and market garden; GreenMarket stands at Union Square and Inwood Markets, as well as a lacto-fermented vegetable processing kitchen, organic bakery, and full-line organic grocery store. It operates the Visiting Students Program and Summer Camps, a residential program welcoming classes of school children during the academic year, as well as children during the summer, for a week or more on the farm; the Farmscape Ecology Program, conducting on farm research, education, and outreach combining an understanding and appreciation of the natural world with a realistic approach to agriculture; and the Farm Learning Center, offering farm apprentice and training programs through Farm Beginnings®.

The Association also oversees the Hawthorne Valley School, an independent day school offering Waldorf education grades Nursery through Twelve; the Center for Social and Environmental Responsibility, researching new social and economic forms that foster social responsibility and environmental sustainability; and Free Columbia, a quest into the heart of artistic action and the relationship between money and art.

Martin has been at Hawthorne Valley for more than 20 years. For much of that time he taught practical arts in the High School and for 14 years was director of facilities and served as project manager on several million dollars of new construction projects. For the past seven years as Executive Director, he has balanced his time developing the working relationships amongst the Association's diverse enterprises (and the 150 co-workers who carry out those initiatives) with cultivating collaborative relationships between Hawthorne Valley and other organizations in the Upper Hudson/Berkshire region as well as like-minded initiatives nationally and globally. Read Less

Masamichi Udagawa is a partner at Antenna Design New York Inc., which he co-founded with Sigi Moeslinger in 1997. Antenna's design projects range from public and commercial to experimental and artistic, typically spanning object, interface and environment. Among Antenna's best known projects are the design of New York City subway cars and ticket vending machines, Bloomberg displays and interactive environments, such as Power Flower, an installation in the windows of Bloomingdale's activated by passersby. Antenna's work has won numerous awards, including recognition from Business Week/IDSA, I.D., Fast Company and Wired magazines. In 2006, Antenna received the United States Artists Target Fellowship in the Architecture and Design Category. In 2008, Antenna won the National Design Award in Product Design.

Before forming Antenna, Masamichi was a senior designer at Apple Computer Industrial Design Group in Cupertino, California. He also worked at the Yamaha Product Design Laboratory in Japan. Masamichi holds a MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BE in Industrial Design from Chiba University in Japan. Read Less

Sigi Moeslinger is a partner at Antenna Design New York Inc., which she co-founded with Masamichi Udagawa in 1997. Antenna's design projects range from public and commercial to experimental and artistic, typically spanning object, interface and environment. Among Antenna's best known projects are the design of New York City subway cars and ticket vending machines, Bloomberg displays and interactive environments, such as Power Flower, an installation in the windows of Bloomingdale's activated by passersby. Antenna's work has won numerous awards, including recognition from Business Week/IDSA, I.D., Fast Company and Wired magazines. In 2006, Antenna received the United States Artists Target Fellowship in the Architecture and Design Category. In 2008, Antenna won the National Design Award in Product Design.

Before forming Antenna, Sigi was an Interval Research Fellow at New York University. Prior, she was a senior designer at IDEO in San Francisco. She holds a master's degree in interactive telecommunications from New York University and a B.S. in industrial design from Art Center College of Design. Read Less

Stefan Sagmeister formed the New York-based Sagmeister Inc. in 1993 and has since designed for clients as diverse as the Rolling Stones, HBO and the Guggenheim Museum. Having been nominated five times for the Grammies, he finally won one for the Talking Heads boxed set. He also earned practically every important international design award.

In 2008, a comprehensive book titled "Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far" was published by Abrams. Solo shows on Sagmeister Inc's work have been mounted in Zurich, Vienna, New York, Berlin, Tokyo, Osaka, Prague, Cologne, Seoul and Miami. He teaches in the graduate department of the School of Visual Art in New York and lectures extensively on all continents.

A native of Austria, he received his MFA from the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and, as a Fulbright Scholar, a master's degree from Pratt Institute in New York. Read Less