TEDxABQ returns this month after three-year hiatus

TEDx, the popular speaker series modeled after TED talks, will return to Albuquerque Sept. 27 after a three-year hiatus.

Twelve speakers will present on a range of topics, from science and technology to hospitality and art, at TEDxABQ’s event later this month.

Albuquerque was one of the first 30 cities globally to be licensed to hold TEDx events around 15 years ago, said organizer Alex Andrego Adams. TEDxABQ went dormant in 2019, though the organizers held a TEDxABQ event in 2022 in an attempt to resurrect the series.

“We were hoping that it was going to take off after that, but it didn’t,” Andrego Adams said.

Andrego Adams said she and TEDxABQ curator Meghan Pickard sought to revive the event for a new, modern audience.

“She and I got together and said that it would be such a shame to let TEDxABQ kind of fizzle away,” Andrego Adams said. “We both really believed that it brought a lot to Albuquerque, and we both got a lot personally from it.”

Unlike in years past, when the internet was still novel, Andrego Adams said she thinks the value of this year’s event is the sense of in-person community. The event this month at the Electric Playhouse on Albuquerque’s West Side will be held in a theater-in-the-round with the audience on all sides, instead of the traditional TED format of presenters in an auditorium.

“This year, we are really playing with the environment and the immersion factor,” she said.

TEDxABQ organizers narrowed down the speakers from a pool of around 200 applicants, Andrego Adams said. Among the speakers are plus-size influencer Jen McLellan, who will present on weight bias in health care, and 10-year-old Eulises Crespo, who will give a talk on curiosity and activism.

Gail Rubin, a death and grief educator, will give her second TEDxABQ talk at the event this month.

“I did my first one in 2015 in Popejoy Hall, in front of 1,200 people. And here we are, 10 years later, after the pandemic and the local program went into hibernation for a while, now they’re back with this year’s events,” Rubin said.

This year, Rubin’s presentation will be on medically-assisted death, which is legal in New Mexico, she said. Though Rubin does speaking engagements across the state, she said the TEDxABQ event is exciting for her, because the presentations will go online on the TEDxTalks YouTube channel.

“That’s huge, because not only will I be educating the people in the room when I give that talk, but it will be preserved and shared online,” Rubin said.

Rubin said she’ll be wearing a new pair of pink metallic boots with skulls embroidered on them, in keeping with the theme of her presentation.

“Anything with a skull or a skeleton on it, it’s a business expense,” she said.