TEDxAcequiaMadre highlights innovation in technology, entertainment and design featuring local speakers who dare to inspire and act. Our goal is to engage New Mexicans in dynamic dialogue and serve as a catalyst for community mobilizing around ideas worth sharing and building upon.

TEDxAcequiaMadre was chosen as the name of Santa Fe’s first live, independent TEDx independent event — where cooperation and creativity was showcased and promoted for the benefit of all residents.

Acequia Madre — Mother Ditch–brings to mind something natural, nurturing and of the elements. It is the manner in which life-sustaining water finds a home above the earth. Acequia Madre is also a Santa Fe street lined with adobe homes, running parallel to Canyon Road housing more than 100 art galleries and flows to within a few blocks of the historic Santa Fe Plaza and the State Capital where lawmakers gather to ponder and plan the fate of New Mexicans.

Acequias have a proud history in Santa Fe and throughout New Mexico illustrating cooperative water use to support communities. TEDxAcequiaMadre, sponsored by the Santa Fe Community Foundation and presented at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design, showcased innovative thinkers and doers who continue to contribute to the City Different’s vibrant intellectual, cultural and entreprenureal life. We hope your will enjoy our TEDx talks and encourage you to network with our speakers and the entire New Mexico TEDx community.

Take a taste of TEDx on YouTube.


Rachel Preston Prinz

New Mexico’s acequias—The future of water in the land of enchantment

Acequias have long been an important resource in New Mexico. In the modern world, the underutilization and misuse of acequias threatens our local agriculture systems and nature's ability to provide for all of us the one thing we need most: water. What future do acequias hold for New Mexico? Can they, and thus we, get back on track to a truly sustainable future?

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Victoria Price

Tell me, what do you have in your house? Finding the tools for success in our own lives

How do we reinvent ourselves when resources seem limited or unavailable? During a time of economic crisis, Victoria Price remembered a story her mother told her — and discovered that the tools we need for recovery and reinvention can be found in our own lives.

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Justina Trott

How an understanding of sex, gender, race, and class can save our lives and money

For years Justina Trott has wondered why 90% of drugs were withdrawn from the market because of side effects in women, and why spending more on health care in the U.S. has resulted in decreased health and a widening health gap. She offers several policies, informed by a process that acknowledges our differences in sex, gender, race and class that can improve health and save lives and money.

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Mike Peters

Liberal education in the digital age

Current economic conditions raise questions about the value of a liberal arts education. And now, new advances in educational technology offer ways to receive an education that are seen as more efficient than "traditional" methods. Mike Peters illustrates how these views substantially undervalue the benefits of a traditional liberal arts education, both for the individual and the society as a whole.

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Andrew Tulchin

Local investing for all

The financial meltdown demonstrated banks are not infallible sources of capital, and clearly new solutions are needed to access credit for building and sustaining healthy communities. Local investing is possible, if you have $1 or $1 million. Andrew Tulchin shares how this old concept — where everyone participates to make a difference — is new again, offering specific examples of how to make it happen in New Mexico.

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Emily Kaltenbach

Public enemy #1 — Nixon’s failed drug war (and how to end it)

It has been over forty years since President Richard Nixon officially declared a "war on drugs." A trillion dollars and millions of ruined lives later, the war on drugs remains a miserable failure. Emily Kaltenbach asks us to revise our strategies for combating drug misuse based on knowledge— developing a strategy designed to get us to a place where politics no longer trumps science, compassion and common sense.

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Cecile Lipworth

One million women turning pain into power

In New Mexico, 260,000 daughters, mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and nieces will be raped, abused, or murdered in their lifetime. The other three quarter million girls and women are at risk every day. The women of New Mexico must turn their pain into power, and demand an end to this violence.

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Amy Christian

How outdoor theater ignites social change

Live outdoor theater triggers change in our world by engaging audiences in a shared, authentic and active experience. Amy believes that accessibility is the key to sparking a dialogue of societal understanding and transformation. By bringing together diverse audiences and revealing our common human condition, people who experience live theater are moved to see our sameness, not our differences.

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Dennis R. Holloway

Encountering architecture and urban design of the pre-contact Americas in virtual reality

State-of-the-art computer software and spatial data can create, in virtual 3D space, a growing model archive of architecture, towns and cities of the Americas as they would have appeared before arrival of the Europeans. Dennis Holloway's computer models show how the U.S. looked when it was populated by indigenous cultures that were intimately connected to the land before the arrival of the Europeans.

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David Perez

Seamlessly starting up in Santa Fe

Since moving to Santa Fe three years ago from New York City, David Perez has heard many times "how difficult" it is to start and build a high tech company in Santa Fe and New Mexico. He's never believed this and in fact used this common point of view as a challenge and source of energy to prove otherwise.

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Justin Handley

Going global — destroying the planet one sale at a time

Justin Handley discusses the impact of the global economy on our ecosystem and why globalization isn't going to see the century out. As planetary resources are consumed by an overpopulated earth, coming back home and learning about our local land bases is the central theme that will create a sustainable future.

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Lois Rudnick

The immigrant blame game

Lois Rudnick explores, through compelling stories and visuals, the 150 year history of blaming immigrants for systemic economic, political, social, medical, educational, and cultural problems.

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Lynn Walters

Cooking with kids — empowering children to make healthy food choices

Did you know that children naturally love to cook? Adults are often surprised to learn that kids enjoy preparing and eating a variety of foods; and research confirms that positive, hands-on food choice and cooking experiences increase children's preferences for fruits and vegetables. Lynn Walters tells us how we can empower children to make healthy food choices.

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Zane Fischer

The free drink

MIX is a structure for interaction and collaboration among inspired individuals, entrepreneurs, innovators, businesses, and organizations. Zane Fischer finds that the same data and game strategies used to predict and modify consumer and voter behavior can be used locally in smaller communities and clusters to affect important change.

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Larry Littlebird

Walking backwards into the future — an ancestral indigenous cosmology

Indigenous peoples have lived intimately rooted in regenerative circles of life. Today's industrialized societies disconnect us from natural systems critical for survival. Walking backwards into the future is about slowing down and listening. This spoken word legacy connects past, present, and future for living in concert with the land.

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Paul Navrot

Nurturing agricultural diversity through backyard seed saving

In Paul Navrot's vision, home gardens are ideal spaces for fostering diversity in cultivated plant strains through seed saving and sharing. Here, heirloom strains are not subject to the pressures of commercialized systems, and can beneficially serve the regional ecosystem and garden community. Paul Navrot wants to teach every gardener how to save, share, and plant food-crop garden seeds.

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Maggie Macnab

Design by nature

Maggie Macnab explores the subtle relationships of everyday natural processes as the essential metaphors of human experience. Linking cultural iconography and pop/corporate symbolism back into their origins of the natural world, she examines the unending versatility of nature and how its ingenious ways of problem-solving creates beautiful and compelling street art, graphic design, and architecture.

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Jerry Wellman

Two axles 4 wheels and a truck full of art

Axle Contemporary is a mobile art gallery in a retrofitted step van, an innovative vehicle for arts distribution. The aim of Axle is to bring diverse artwork to diverse audiences. When Axle parks and opens its doors, you can't help but step in and actively participate in a dialogue about the art that is on display. Axel is expanding the definitions of art and its dissemination in an effort to reveal our community to itself.

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Dubra Karnes-Padilla

Designing the Santa Fe–Belen Railrunner Artists’ Corridor

The Santa Fe-Belen Railrunner Artists' Corridor connects the communities of Santa Fe and Belen — a small town of 7,500 that is struggling to revitalize itself. This creative corridor could promote walking and biking guides to local artists and studios at every train stop. With the development of mobile apps, websites, and local guided tours, these communities can work collaboratively to promote the arts and economic development in Belen.

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Nancy Judd

Undressing the crime scene — addressing how to slow climate change

Nancy Judd creates couture fashion sculptures from trash to raise awareness about pressing environmental concerns. How can a dress be an agent of change? Nancy Judd will undress Crime Scene — her most provocative garment to-date, to reveal the personal and planetary violence it embodies.

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