TEDxSanMigueldeAllende

Speakers

Speakers may not be confirmed. Check the event website for the latest lineup.

• Alzenira (Lady Zen) Quezada

  Performing Artist + Producer + Published Poet

  Alzenira Quezada, known professionally as Lady Zen, makes the human voice a force of transformation—crossing borders, dissolving genres, and turning lived experience into shared connection. An internationally celebrated performing artist, producer, poet, and Fulbright Scholar based in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, they draw on classical opera training to create a singular fusion of soul, jazz, and lyric poetry. Their career has taken them from London, Amsterdam, and Antwerp to Brazil and San Francisco, collaborating with multi-Grammy-winning artists and serving as Musical Director for the Marin Shakespeare Company. Lady Zen is also the writer and subject of an acclaimed biographical film honored with more than 30 international awards. Through voice, storytelling, and humor, Lady Zen invites audiences to cross boundaries, embrace identity, and discover connection through difference.

• Annika Rhea

  Multidisciplinary Artist + Filmmaker + Creative Wellness Advocate

  Annika Rhea is a NYC-based multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, performance painter, and creative wellness advocate. She has exhibited and performed internationally, including during Art Basel Miami, Art Basel Switzerland and the Hamptons Fine Art Fair. She is the creator of BODY MEDIUM, an immersive painting practice that uses the body in motion as a painting tool, merging visual art, performance, dance, music and film. Rhea also hosts The Aligned Creative Podcast and developed Flow Loop Theory, a practical framework for moving though resistance and building resilience. Drawing from more than two decades of movement training and her experience as a working artist, her work explores the relationship between embodiment, creativity, adaptation, and flow, and how the creative process can offer practical insights for navigating change.

• Araceli Kopiloff

  Cultural Advocate · Community Builder · Author

  Araceli Kopiloff is a bilingual cultural advocate, community builder, author, speaker, and co-founder of Love in San Miguel, an initiative centered on connection and community. Born in Uruguay, raised in the United States with a career in fashion design, and based in Mexico since 2020, she brings a lifelong commitment to service, storytelling, and creating meaningful relationships across cultures. Following a period of profound personal loss, Araceli began examining what happens to love when the person, place, or life it was directed toward is no longer there. Her experience led her to explore grief not simply as something to endure, but as a force that can reshape identity, deepen connection, and redirect love toward purpose and action. Through her writing, speaking, and community work, Araceli explores how people can carry love forward while adapting to unexpected changes in the stories they imagined for their lives.

• Ben Ptashnik

  Environmental and Climate Action Advocate · Co-Founder, Tikkun Institute · Former Vermont State Senator

  Ben Ptashnik is an environmental advocate, entrepreneur, and former Vermont State Senator with five decades of work for ecological and economic sustainability. In the Senate, he advanced regenerative agriculture, renewable energy, sustainable development, health, and campaign finance reform. He was the first Director of NOFA, New England’s Organic Farmers' NGO, and co-founded Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility and EarthRight Institute, promoting ecology and recycling. In Mexico, he founded a fair-trade enterprise with artisan families in San Miguel Allende, and his Solar San Miguel company helped expand solar and wind energy across eight states. In 2008 he founded Tikkun Institute for Ecological Restoration, where he is developing a regional reforestation and watershed restoration in the Río Laja basin. Ben serves as Treasurer of San Miguel Community Foundation.

• Christian Zaíd

  Specialty Coffee Barista + Roaster + Educator

  Christian Zaid is a specialty coffee barista, roaster, and educator with more than 13 years of experience at the helm of El Café de la Mancha, a beloved fixture in San Miguel de Allende’s specialty coffee community. His professional training includes barista studies, specialized coffee roasting, and SCA certifications in Brewing, as well as training in coffee fermentation and post-harvest processing. He has participated in numerous barista and brewing competitions, earning first place regionally in the AeroPress category in both 2021 and 2025. As a roaster, Christian explores the relationship between processing, roast profiles, and extraction. His work brings a technical, sensory, and accessible approach to specialty coffee, transforming knowledge into experiences that invite people to taste, compare, pay attention, and discover.

• Donnie Masterton

  Chef + Restaurateur + Mentor

  Chef Donnie Masterton began his culinary career at 15, training under celebrated chefs including David Bouley and Patrick Clark before leading kitchens in New York, Washington, California and Los Angeles. After moving to San Miguel de Allende, he founded The Restaurant, where his approach combines global culinary influences with locally sourced ingredients and deep respect for craft, organic farming, mentorship and community.

• Ethan Feldman

  Chiropractor · Clinician · Educator · Explorer of the Science of Chang

  Dr. Ethan Feldman is a chiropractor, educator, and movement specialist with nearly four decades of clinical experience. Founder of KinEase Release Methods™️, his work explores how neurophysiology can help the body reset through comfort and safety rather than force. His clinical work has led him to a broader question: What happens when we apply this same principle beyond the body? Ethan explores an emerging shift—from forcing change to creating the conditions that allow change to occur—with implications for healthcare, psychology, education, and parenting.

• Joseph Bennett

  Improv actor + Author + Story-based Assemblage Artist + Happiness Coach

  Joseph Bennett is an improv actor, author, story-based assemblage artist, and Happiness Coach who has called San Miguel de Allende home for more than 17 years. He is the co-founder of The Improv People, where he has spent more than a decade exploring spontaneity, connection, and the transformative power of play. Together with his husband, Eli Hans, Joseph also facilitates personal growth retreats and workshops through San Miguel Retreats. He is the author of seven books, including Trust with a Capital T: Your Go-to Guide for Troubling Times, with a foreword by Debra Poneman. Across his writing, art, coaching, and performance, Joseph explores the stories we tell ourselves and how curiosity, creativity, human connection, and laughter can help us meet uncertainty with greater openness. At the heart of his work is a simple conviction: joy is not frivolous, but a vital way of engaging with life.

• Luis Díaz Gordoa

  Multidisciplinary Artist · Explorer of Nature, Symbolism & Perception

  Luis Alberto Díaz Gordoa (VENA2) is a multidisciplinary Mexican artist born in León, Guanajuato, in 1979. His work is deeply inspired by nature and explores how symbols, materials, and visual language can expand perception and create spaces for reflection and connection. His practice spans public art, immersive installations, private commissions, art direction, and multiple media. Drawing on ancient symbols and contemporary forms, VENA2 investigates the relationship between ancestral knowledge, consciousness, and transformation. His current project, RAÍCES, explores seven foundational foods of Mexico through art, microscopic imagery, symbolism, and immersive experience, connecting contemporary visual practice with cultural memory and the natural world.

• Manuel Rosemberg

  CEO / Co-Founder ANA Care + Social Entrepreneur + Care and AI

  Manuel Rosemberg is a Mexican social entrepreneur and Co-founder and CEO of ANA Care, a platform using artificial intelligence to strengthen, train, and support those who provide care at home. For more than two decades, he has developed initiatives across health, education, and sustainability. He studied at Columbia University and has pursued further studies at MIT. In 2025, he was recognized by the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship as a Social Entrepreneur of the Year, an honor presented in connection with the World Economic Forum in Davos. His work in caregiving also grew from personal experience, as he navigated the simultaneous care needs of several members of his own family. Through ANA Care, he is working to professionalize and dignify caregiving by combining technology, education, and human support. His work asks a timely question: How can technology strengthen care without losing what makes it deeply human?

• Marco Debrayes

  Visual Artist + Mojiganga Creator + Cultural Promoter

  Marco Antonio Bautista Arroyo, known as Marco Debrayes!, is a visual artist and cultural creator from San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Raised in a family of multidisciplinary artisans, he grew up surrounded by traditional techniques, craftsmanship, and design, which became the foundation of his creative practice. Working primarily with cartonería, Marco creates surreal sculptural works and has developed his own contemporary interpretation of the Mojigangas, the monumental figures deeply rooted in San Miguel’s popular celebrations. Through his workshop, he continues a family tradition while transforming it through experimentation, scale, color, and imagination. His work has appeared in major cultural productions, including Mexico City’s monumental Day of the Dead parade, and in collaborations with Ágatha Ruiz de la Prada and Pineda Covalin. His practice explores how tradition stays alive by being reimagined and passed forward.

• Mimi Gendreau Kigawa

  Health-Tech Founder

  Mimi Gendreau Kigawa is building a new model of lung care that pairs AI with virtual rehabilitation, bringing personalized, preventative support into the homes of people living with chronic respiratory disease. Her work reimagines the future of medicine around a simple right: to breathe, move, and live with dignity. While at Harvard, Mimi co-created TINA, a bioremediation platform that uses bacteria to pull heavy metals like manganese from polluted rivers and repurpose them for lithium-ion batteries, which won the Linda Tischler Award from Fast Company. She also created Zia, a menstrual diagnostic platform for early cervical cancer detection for women in rural Mexico. Across her projects, Mimi looks for where systems are failing people and builds the technology to fix it.

• Pilar De Reyes

  Writer + Classical Chinese Medicine Practitioner + International Nonprofit Co-Founder

  Pilar de Reyes, M.S., L.Ac. is an acupuncturist, cross-cultural practitioner, and author whose work explores how different healing traditions understand the body, illness, and the human experience. Over decades of clinical practice, study, and travel, she has investigated how culture shapes our understanding of health and healing, drawing particularly from classical East Asian medicine and encounters with diverse medical traditions. Her work brings clinical observation into conversation with a broader inquiry: what can different systems of knowledge teach us about being human? She is currently completing Three Stones Make Fire, a literary memoir weaving medicine, myth, pilgrimage, and cross-cultural encounter, and exploring what becomes possible when we learn to see beyond the assumptions of our own cultural lens.

• Sofia De la Mora

  AI Engineer building in Stealth

  Sofía de la Mora Tostado is an AI engineer, entrepreneur, and founder of Intelital, where she builds predictive intelligence systems that help organizations make complex decisions. Trained in Applied Mathematics and Political Science at ITAM, she holds a master’s degree in Data Science from Columbia University. Her work sits at the intersection of mathematics, artificial intelligence, human behavior, and power. Before founding Intelital, Sofía developed AI and data-driven systems across government and the technology sector, including work with Banco de México and Mexico’s Federal Judiciary. Her research applying graph theory and knowledge networks to the study of human trafficking earned her the Sotero Prieto Prize in mathematics. A Techstars NYC 2025 founder, she now explores not only what artificial intelligence can do, but what happens to human judgment and autonomy as we increasingly depend on it.