Ali Jacs - TEDxChristchurchA self-proclaimed 'pragmatic muser' working to save the world through creative persuasion, Ali Jacs honed her craft through poetry slam competitions and performances in schools, bars, museums, and festivals as far away as Canada and the USA.
After winning the 2013 NZ National Poetry Slam, she went on to feature as a guest at the Australian National Poetry Slam and self-published her first chapbook Romantic Pragmatism. |
|
Grace Taylor - TEDxAucklandGrace Taylor is a spoken word poet, teaching artist and youth development worker. She believes in the empowerment of words, in particular through creative manifestations and providing spaces for people to tell their own stories. Grace’s poetry ciphers strongly around dialogues about identity, with her believing that the exploration of a sense of belonging is underestimated in many facets of society. Grace is co-founder of the South Auckland Poets Collective and the Rising Voices Youth Poetry Movement.
|
|
|
|
Michael Howard - TEDxVUWMichael Howard is a local performance poet. His poetry is absurd, unsentimental and best enjoyed with a pint. From sixty-three letter German words to competitive sack-racing, any topic is fair game for this wordsmith.
His talent was honed on the mean streets of Wellington, where the only escape from his harsh reality was in iambic pentameter and craft beer. This can be heard in his work's rhythmic, slightly boozy quality. He has also developed something of a reputation for excessive rhyming and terrible puns. For this he makes no apologies. |
Marina Alefosio - TEDxAucklandMarina Alefosio is a Spoken Word Artist and Facilitator who studied Creative Writing at the Manukau Institute of Technology. She has trained and performed for the last five years as a performance poet, participating in and leading community and youth groups in performance and poetry workshops. She was a member of the critically acclaimed South Auckland Poets Collective and has performed both locally and internationally at various venues and events including Nuyorican Poets Café, New York; Te Papa Museum, Wellington; and the Adelaide Fringe Festival.
|
|
Jess Holly Bates - TEDxAucklandWe all have personas, masks, different people we are when are around different groups. Jess breaks this wide open with a unique talk/performance about how we can slip between different projections of ourselves.
Jess is a theatre practitioner, vulnerability junkie, writer and artist, who loves to communicate cultural criticism through performance. She investigates the way our bodies behave in social relations, particularly in relation to our ongoing colonial hangover in New Zealand. In 2014 her acclaimed solo spoken word/theatre show Real Fake White Dirt (Best Writing NZ Fringe 2015) was published as a book of poetry by Anahera Press. She believes that the only way to acknowledge our difficult history is to lean into the real discomfort of being Pakeha. Her 2016 work The Offensive Nipple Show is a collaborative body project responding to the dangerous ways gender politics are disconnecting us from one another. Through performance, she seeks to find new ways of looking at each others bodies, that are both cheeky and empowering. |
|
Mohamed Hassan - TEDxAuckland & TEDxYouth@Auckland
|
Mohamed Hassan is a spoken word poet and journalist from Cairo, Egypt. He has spent the majority of his life in Auckland, navigating the spaces between two cultures and languages. A storyteller at heart, his poetry uses characters, narratives and humour to explore identity and society. He strongly believes in the power of poetry to build foundations for young people to speak and be heard. He is the winner of the Rising Voices Youth Poetry Slam 2013, and has been performing across Auckland stages. He is part of a young collective of poets called the Waxed Poetic Revival.
Mohamed's performance at TEDxYouth@Auckland can be found here, and another performance from TEDxAuckland can be found here. |
|