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).

UNYP Arena
Kovanecká 27
Prague, Praha 9, 19000
Czech Republic

Alessia Gloder

CEO

Alessia is an Aerospace Engineer with a diverse, international and multidisciplinary background. She is the Project Manager of ASCenSIon, a project funded by the European Commission focused on sustainable access to space for Europe. She has academic and industrial experience both in technical and commercial roles, and is a business and product consultant for space startups. She took part in several workshops, conferences and projects worldwide, collaborated with renowned entities (ESA, NASA, etc.) and won international prizes. Alessia is active in the international space community and is part of several of its organisations, also with leading positions. She is an advocate of education, gender equality, diversity and inclusion in the space sector and she strongly believes that space is a field for all.

Carlos Davidovich

Performance and executive coach

Carlos Davidovich, M.D., is a performance and executive coach with over twenty years of experience supporting the development of leaders and management teams alike on an international scale. Originally educated as a medical doctor and drawing on his management experience in business executive roles for multinational pharmaceutical companies in the area of biotechnology; Carlos combines his understanding of the brain and of business to deliver lectures, workshops, and coaching modalities that help his clients apply the principles of Neuromanagement within their organizations to create sustainable change. As co-author of Personality DNA: Discover Your True Personality, he is also helping individuals succeed by gaining knowledge over their own unique character traits. Carlos teaches in several MBA programs in Canada and Europe and is thought leader with the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital, a Harvard Medical School affiliate.

Elizaveta Negreeva

People & Culture Project Manager

Elizaveta is an aspiring HR professional on the way to break corporate-related and age-related stereotypes and catalyze people's success. In her current position of People & Culture Project Manager in CzHuSk cluster of Japan Tobacco International, she is among other heavily supporting employees' wellbeing; however, she remains engaged in promoting wellbeing outside of the workplace as well. Liza's following her personal mission to help thrive through developing and maintaining fulfilling lifestyle and unleashing potential while staying human. The focus in her mission is on the organic, healthy personal development, primarily of young adults discovering their purpose in professional and private life. Liza's educational background includes a bachelor's degree in International Area Studies from Charles University in Prague and a master's in Personnel Management and Organizational Development from Masaryk University in Brno.

Farokh Shahabi

Entrepreneur + CEO

Farokh is a serial entrepreneur and a developer-turned-CEO with over 10 years of experience. He's the Co-founder & CEO of Formaloo, a powerful no-code collaboration platform for teams to collect, organize and understand their data. He previously served in key leadership or advisory roles in several startups in 10+ countries and worked with various VCs, accelerators, and organizations internationally. Some of his most noteworthy experiences are co-founding Eventbox, international event management & organization platform for professional organizers, Hostinstall, one of the UK's finest data & web solution providers, and also Bipfa, which was MENA's biggest Micro-blogging Platform. He's also a professional writer. He published his first book in 2013 and he's working on his second book. He works on his novel series in his spare time.

Jakub Dvořák

Dancer + Choreographer

Elevating the Czech dance industry. That's the goal for Jakub. He started dancing when he was four. However, he never studied dance conservatory. At 16, he started his professional dancing career in agencies around Europe. He quickly got into dancing for brands such as Adidas, Hilton or Hyundai, but he knew he wanted to create more than dance others' choreographies. When he was 18, he took over his home dance studio, which was at that time one of the weakest ones on the scene. A year after launching the studio he opened his professional dance agency called Fragments Production, which has done over 200 shows for Czech artists such as Leoš Mareš, Mikolas Josef, Pavel Šporcl, and brands such as Bosch, Mercedes or Tezenis, as well as TV shows such as Czechoslovakia Got Talent, Dancing with the Stars, adverts and concept videos. He now runs three Movement Studios in Prague, Brno and Veselí nad Lužnicí. The dance schools are currently the most successful ones in Czech Republic.

Joseph Petrila

Marketing manager + Curator

Joey Petrila spent 9 years growing up on a sailboat traveling around the Caribbean, USA, and Central America with his parents and older sister. Life at sea and travel brought a wide variety of challenges and experiences to an ever-relocating kid-turned-teenager. Joey was a homeschooled student, then a student at a local school in Mexico for 2 years. Then he transitioned to online correspondence learning while living in Malaysia and across Europe - and finally graduated from an American public high school in 2017. Joey learned that there are common bonds between people that can go unseen beneath the consistently polarizing discourse that divides us. Today, Joey works in the field of communication and is an activist in favor of youth-led solution building when it comes to tackling pressing issues in society. At 23 years old, he's the youngest elected Curator of the World Economic Forum's youth initiative based in Prague, which he oversees in his free time.

Lenka Helena Koenigsmark

Marketing director

Lenka Helena Koenigsmark is a marketing director at MATTEL Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary where she makes children´s dreams come true. Acts as a corporate citizen in promoting diversity and inclusion Being a mother to a handicapped child resulted in becoming a devoted blogger on Instagram flagging that "Happiness has nothing to do with handicap ". Worked for LEGO and WELLA cosmetics, initially her background is master's degree in finances and financial markets, yet luckily, she never entered this field thus saving many companies from going bankrupt as marketing is more of her DNA than economics. Mother of two, devoted to yoga, finally after a year head stand master, after the birth of a first son decided to play the piano as to fulfill a child´s dream, resulting in a long journey lasting already for more than 8 years. Soon to be at Carnegie Hall (well in 20 years plus).

Mark Francis Long

Public speaker + Digital Strategist

At the age of 6, Mark Francis was diagnosed with dyslexia. Through hard work and a lot of spell check, he graduated with a BA in Mass Media from UNYP in 2011 and has been working as a Brand Strategist & Creative Director in global advertising agencies ever since, in Prague, NYC, and San Francisco. Unfortunately, he has kept his dyslexia hidden from his friends and colleagues through this time, afraid he would be judged or even fired. But now, in his mid-thirties, with two children, he started to feel the need to understand his dyslexia better. Mark also wants to contribute his skills and experience to push for better dyslexia awareness amongst the masses and his community. Dyslexia is riddled with old paradigms, misunderstandings, and false narratives. It is about time to showcase the extraordinary creatives and exceptional problem solvers with something that connects them all - their neurodiversity. How do we start? By rebranding their identity to reflect the modern age.

Maya Kvetny

Casting director

Originally from Los Angeles, Maya started out as an art broker in San Francisco. After moving to Prague in 1992, Maya opened Myrnyx Tyrnyx, an alternative vintage boutique, encouraging her clientele to own and express their individuality and uniqueness. Maya is perhaps best known in Prague for founding an internationally renowned casting agency of the same name in 1998. Myrnyx Tyrnyx Agency broke racial and cultural barriers in the Czech entertainment industry with their diversity, delivering fine actors, top models, performers, and other talent with the spirit of breaking tradition and stereotypes. The Agency has successfully cast foreign and local feature films, TV series and commercials for the international market, including Spiderman: Far From Home, Oscar-winning film Jojo Rabbit, and The Gray Man.

Nile Wilson

Gymnast + Olympic athlete

Nile Wilson is one of Great Britain's greatest ever gymnasts and has been a trailblazer for the sport in many different ways. He won a Bronze Medal in the Horizontal Bar at the 2016 Rio Olympics which was Team GB's first ever Olympic medal in the discipline. He is also England's most successful ever gymnast at a Commonwealth Games following his 3 gold medals and 2 silver medals in 2018. Yet, Nile is so much more than just a gymnast - a YouTuber with over 1.5 million subscribers and 350 million total views; a social media influencer; a highly successful entrepreneur; an advocate for mental health awareness; and a powerful voice within his sport over the historic treatment of gymnasts. Nile himself has been very open about his own personal struggles with mental health issues and gambling. Nile is an inspiration to millions due to his accomplishments, his humour and, most importantly, his honesty in life.

Paula Árendášová

Dance teacher + Psychologist

Paulina Arendasova graduated with a double undergraduate degree and a master's degree in Psychology from the University of New York in Prague. Building her career path as an accredited coach and psychologist, Paulina works as HR assistant and a certified Twerk technician. Paulina's passion is to empower women via teaching them Twerk in combination with applying the knowledge from Psychology to her dance classes. Her research published by the journal Marathon (The ASE, Department of Physical Education and Sports in Bucharest, Romania) shows that the dance styles focused on sexual expression (eg. Twerk) have a positive impact on sexual self-esteem and self-body image in adult women dancers. This is why she encourages people to use sexual expression as a healing tool for mental health rather than the target of prejudice. Believing the healing aspects of the sexual expression, Paulina tries to challenge the societal view that describes sexual expression as inappropriate or taboo.

Petr Kovařík

General director + Book author

Petr spent a fourth of his life outside of Czechia, visited more than 50 countries and usually he spent there longer than just a few days. He lived in Cuba for two years where he understood how to love life even if sometimes it gives us a huge punch to our face. He spent several of his business years in the Emirates, Saudi Arabia or Oman where his chocolate company delivers to the Sultan of Oman. Everywhere he's been he always found the same things. You can learn something even from the most difficult situation, and secondly, everybody, really everybody deserves respect. From this he understood that harmony and balance is his goal and he continues on his path to accomplishing it. He produces chocolate and hosts chocolate ceremonies with his partner Silvie. In his book, Sila hotentota, he writes about and links chocolate production processes with our personal development, and on his podcast, "Which Czechia do you want?" he tries to harmonize our divided society.

Sara Polak

Archaeologist in AI + Researcher into Cloud Civilisations

Sara is originally an archaeologist and cognitive evolutionary anthropologist. For the past decade, she has been working in startups in the UK and US, mainly focusing on artificial intelligence. Since the start of the COVID pandemic, she has been focusing on educating the general public in digital literacy and demystifying artificial intelligence and demonstrating its usefulness in the 21st century as well as the need for understanding it in multidisciplinary context, especially as the member of the NGO Parallel Polis. For these efforts she was awarded the #Forbes30Under30 and Innovator of the Year 2022. She freshly started a new research group called CHAOS, focused on studying the phenomenon of cloud civilizations and understanding/modelling social interactions and evolution using VR and AI. Sara is currently writing a book on memes and history, is a big fan of Monty Python and Wikipedia.

Tatyana Fomina

Consultant

Tatyana Fomina is a UNYP graduate and a digital marketer, who's passionate about synergy of new technologies and modern marketing practices. Her professional background started by working hand-in-hand with deep-tech start-ups in the innovation industry, and inspired a significant interest in understanding and creating marketing strategies for modern businesses. Having lived in several international environments and worked in business communication, Tatyana understands the power of authentic connections and seeks to have co-elevating relationships in her network. This is why she currently serves in the leadership of a youth entrepreneurship and development cluster, highly involved in personal development, fostering connections with like-minded people and creating extraordinary friendships.