Documentary maker and #MEAction founder Jen Brea will give a talk at the prestigious, five-day TED summit in Banff, Canada, on Monday, June 27. Her presentation will be one of seven talks by TED fellows in a session starting at 11:15 a.m. MDT (Mountain Daylight Time) and will focus on her experience with ME.
The first TED talk was in 1984, and featured speakers who discussed Lucasfilm’s graphic design technology, the first e-books, and a demonstration of the Compact Disc. In 1990, TED talks were made into a yearly event, and in 2006, TED settled into the form for which it is now best known: a nonprofit devoted to spreading important scientific, technological and cultural ideas in the form of short, powerful talks delivered to a live audience, broadcast online and then posted to YouTube. The speaker must present their topic in the most engaging way possible, in a maximum of 18 minutes.  Past speakers include luminaries such as Bill Clinton, Richard Dawkins, Bill Gates and Bono, and many talks go viral, gaining millions of views online.
Brea tweeted that she was “thrilled and humbled” to be giving the talk and “I pushed so hard to finish my draft last night I can barely move! I may need to not speak for ten days straight so that I can have enough in me to speak for sixteen minutes straight.”
TED’s most popular 20 talks of all time can be seen here.
Stay tuned for some great news regarding Brea’s Canary in a Coal Mine project soon!
 
Jaime Seltzer made significant contributions to this article.