Theme: Are you paying attention?

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized (subject to certain rules and regulations).

Lakeside Theatre
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park
Colchester, Essex, CO4 3SQ
United Kingdom

Abigail Agyei

Abigail Agyei is an award winning, MBE holding, dynamic senior policy advisor and change maker. She has over seven years’ experience in building and maintaining strong relationships with internal and external stakeholders and community groups, leading community projects with vast experience supporting voluntary and marginalized groups. She's also incredibly passionate about intersectional identities, amplifying marginalised communities' voices and how their lived experiences are shaped in the world.

Annika Loebig

Annika Loebig is a writer and Journalism student at London College of Communication, with an insatiable curiosity and desire to start conversations about contemporary human issues. She is also the founder of Cringe (@cringe_mag ), an independent magazine exploring shame and self-consciousness through writing and art. Her writing ranges from features about philosophy, feminism, social justice, nature, death and mental health, to corporate copy for various companies such as graphene company Paragraf, tech startup Multiplii, and creative community SuperHi.

Eliot Wood

Eliot Wood is the co-founder of WYSPR. Whilst studying authentic influence, Fyre Festival, and Cambridge Analytica for his dissertation at the University of Essex, he made it his mission in life to give consumers a way to empower themselves and their data online, and so their aim is to create a world where anyone can get paid to advertise and sell their data in a clean and ethical manner.

Henriette Laursen

Henriette Laursen is a Danish actor/writer/director living in London and she's been creating work for theatre and film since 2016; her latest being ‘Going Straight to Gay… Or something in-between’. Besides working in the creative industry, she has a degree in Anthropology from the University of Copenhagen. She finds that anthropology and the arts go very much hand in hand as we create for other people to experience. Henriette has always been extremely fascinated by human behaviour and why we do what we do.

Jude Guaitamacchi

Jude Guaitamacchi is a Trans, Non-binary Public Speaker, Consultant and Model. They champion transgender equality and inclusion in schools and organisations across the UK and Europe. They work with some of Britain’s leading independent schools as well as audiences from a variety of backgrounds and cultures. Jude speaks very openly about their experiences, delivering workshops in trans awareness. Jude was the first non-binary person to represent Harrods for their H Beauty campaign and has been featured in Vogue. Jude aims to pave the way for further trans and non-binary representation in the world of fashion and beauty, hoping to be the role model they needed growing up. They hope to inspire future generations to see themselves represented, empower themselves and celebrate who they are!

Lottie Graham

Lottie Graham is a filmmaker originally from Jersey in the Channel Islands. She has worked on a number of short narratives and documentaries under her production label, I90 West Productions. Lottie is currently working on her first feature documentary film exploring the intricacies of fish communication and how this affects the world.

Matthew Gillett

Matthew Gillett is an international lawyer who has investigated and prosecuted war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide before the international courts for around 15 years. After seeing news of atrocities when he was growing up far away in New Zealand, he decided to take action and help to prosecute the perpetrators of these crimes like those in Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s. Matthew has gone on to undertake missions in Afghanistan, in the Central African Republic, and other conflict-torn areas of the world. And now he is paying attention to Yemen, where grave human rights abuses continue to be inflicted on large number of civilians, even while the world's attention is largely focused elsewhere.

Pascal Vrticka

Pascal Vrticka is a Lecturer / Assistant Professor in Psychology at the University of Essex (Colchester, UK) and Principal Investigator of the Social Neuroscience of Human Attachment (SoNeAt) Lab @soneatlab. His research focuses on the biological and brain basis of human social interaction, attachment, and caregiving. To do so, Pascal assesses brain function, anatomy, and connectivity in parents and their children independently. Most recently, he also started looking at behavioural and brain-to-brain synchrony in mother-child and father-child pairs.

Tobias Rauscher

Tobias Rauscher is a modern fingerstyle guitarist, YouTuber, part time Digital Nomad and online entrepreneur from Germany. He originally planned to work in the music industry to help promote other musicians, but after his own music took off (50 million+ views), he decided to go all in and make music his main thing. While growing his fanbase, he started his own online guitar academy and shortly after that, Tobias also founded the Fanbase Academy, an online program that helps musicians & creative people to market themselves online.