On Saturday, September 27 at Electric Playhouse, some of Albuquerque’s most out-of-the-box intellectual innovators aim to resurrect a tradition that gathers inquisitive individuals from various ages and backgrounds to let their minds meander and explore the creative possibilities of today’s ever-changing universe. TEDxABQ 2025 kicks off at 1 p.m. and features five hours of lectures from 12 speakers across three engaging sessions. Between sessions, convocation-goers are invited to explore exciting engagement zones, pop-up installations and various opportunities to connect with one another. At 7 p.m. you can join everyone for a VIP After Party complete with curated cocktails, food and a chance to connect directly with speakers, organizers and other like-minded thinkers.
“TEDx is such a safe place to try things, right? It’s not your job, it’s a fun place. You’re doing it for fun, for curiosity, for imagination and innovation. So why not really embrace that element of it?” TEDxABQ Lead Organizer and Curator Alex Andrego Adams says. “A TED talk is a recorded version of the speaker on the stage, and those get posted onto YouTube and get shared pretty broadly. But a TED event — or specifically a TEDx event — is created with a multiple number of those speakers giving those talks live, and usually comes with engagements and projects like community art or other types of activities that are designed to bring people together, get people to think about things a little bit differently. So the event is a unique experience that you can’t recreate in the virtual world.”
Alex Andrego Adams and Meghan Pickard are co-curators and lead “organixesr” of the event. Adams is also president of Curiosity Inc., a company that oversees initiatives supporting economic development in Albuquerque since June 2024, and Pickard is the group’s vice president. They’re hoping that attendees will have follow-up conversations. So one of their main jobs is to facilitate the exchange of ideas. The unifying theme is “Curiosity” and how curiosity plays a role in developing ideas and creating innovation and possibility for the future. Adams says she hopes the audience will trust them and go down “a little rabbit hole adventure.”
“We’re really hoping that people walk away with a little bit of a wow feeling and say, ‘That wasn’t what I expected from a traditional TED event,’” Adams says. “This is just the start of year-round programming. We’re hoping that each of these speakers are going to have smaller engagements and really do more hands-on activities around their ideas, so we can take them off the stage and let people engage with the speakers a little bit more.”
TEDx ABQ was started by Tim Nisly back in 2010, and Adams says, according to her intel, they were approximately the 33rd group in the world to get a license and host a TEDx event. With a strong legacy and heritage built under Nisly’s leadership, TEDxABQ amassed nearly 2000 attendees in 2018. But right before the pandemic, with a change in leadership, subsequent nationwide restrictions and other factors out of their control, TEDxABQ went dormant. Adams says during COVID it was very difficult to get volunteers to help, and because these events thrive on the in-person exchange of ideas, TEDxABQ didn’t pivot very well to a virtual setting. In 2022 they tried to resurrect it, and there was a successful event with about 300 attendees at the African American Performing Arts Center, but they never quite achieved the same engagement that TEDxABQ had pre-COVID.
“In 2023 we went out to TEDx in Verona and got really excited and inspired again about the resurgence that TEDx is having in Europe and got some ideas for how we wanted to really reboot TEDx ABQ here. When we started back in 2010, YouTube was kind of a new thing. And now electronic media and social media have completely changed, right?” Adams says. “Megan and I both have technical and business backgrounds, and we’re both strategists and operationalist folks. So we decided, if we were going to bring it back, we were going to bring it back as a legitimate 501 c3 nonprofit.”
During that mind-opening European vacation, Adams and Pickard came up with 2025’s theme of “Curiosity.” Adams says the value in a TEDx event used to be sharing ideas on the internet broadly, but these days the value lies in the human connection that comes from being part of a community.
“When people come to a TED or TEDx ABQ event, they’re really expecting to engage with people who want to learn, who are curious, who have thoughts about different things and want to engage in conversation and play with possibilities – as we call it. And so that’s what this year’s event really is. It’s a culmination of all of that work, trying to bring it back with a bang. And it’s going to be at the Electric Playhouse, which we’re really excited about,” Adams says.
Since Electric Playhouse does some beautiful things with AI and digital art projection, the organizers of TEDxABQ have been able to team up with one of Electric Playhouse’s founders John-Mark Collins to create something really exciting. One of the surprises they’re hoping to pull off this year will be bringing out a special MC and host for the evening: an AI robot named X.
“We’ve been playing around with him for about a year. He’s John-Mark’s intellectual property, and he’s just really cool. And we’ve been learning a little bit about AI and how to make it more fun and introduce it to people in a little bit of a different and more artistic way. So between really leveraging the immersion and interaction capabilities of the electric Playhouse, we’re working with some other folks who have some really great AI expertise. It’s going to help us do some of the imagery and rendering. And we’re going to have a 360 stage, which I’ve never seen a TEDx organization pull off before. So we’re being pretty ambitious about it, but we’re hoping that it pays off. If anything, we really hope that what our audience comes away with is that ‘Wow’ moment.”
Adams says the TEDxABQ 2025 speaker application process was also different from a traditional participant screening. She calls it “speaker speed dating” and says the unorthodox exchange was both fruitful and really fun. After researching potential candidates, they threw them through an analytical gauntlet, so to speak.
“They had to come and talk to five of our different coaches and curators, and basically went through five of us in a row and had to explain their ideas to us. And then we got to have a little bit of questioning back and forth. What was fun is they had to be prepared to articulate their idea pretty concisely. It was a little bit intense to mimic some of the speaker coaching process that they are currently going through to get to the TEDxABQ stage.”
The experiment yielded excellent results: TEDxABQ presenters such as Thomas Fite, who will explain why we shouldn’t be afraid of New Mexico’s AI future. Jen McLellen is a certified childbirth educator, speaker and founder of Plus Size Birth, who will be speaking about weight bias in the medical industry and the importance of self advocacy. Olivia Mead’s talk addresses the fact that high-stress professionals such as first responders receive training for the physical aspects of their job, but not the mental aspects, and she has a potential solution. Dr. Nina C. Christie will talk about her research in addiction and what she’s discovered regarding the human connection. Other guests include Hunter McDaniel, Dr. Norm Dawson, Ricardo Caté, Dr. Fernando Moreu and Howie Kaibel.
Even the range of topics discussed at this year’s event aims to mix things up in a thought-provoking manner. Two of the guests will talk about subjects that may seem to be polar opposites: comedy and death. Comedian Sarah Kennedy will explore the relationship between comedy and community and says her presentation is “actually kinda super-serious, which is new and novel for me.”
“Using Electric Playhouse’s technology, every speaker is able to do their talk ‘from’ anywhere in the universe, but I couldn’t think of anywhere better to give my talk than Albuquerque, NM. TEDx talks are ideas worth sharing, but in Albuquerque you also get them smothered in cheese and chile,” she says. “It’s kind of amazing that Electric Playhouse and TEDx are able to transform a former Staples into something so impactful and special. Since Furr’s closed, we’ve been waiting for something this exciting to come to I-40 and Coors!”
On the opposite end of the topic spectrum is presenter Gail Rubin with a talk about death, but it’s not what you’d likely expect. To say she’s an expert is an understatement. Around Albuquerque, she’s known as “The Doyenne of Death.” But being an expert in a subject people sometimes shy away from discussing provides Rubin, and this year’s TEDxABQ audience, an opportunity to engage in a healthy and even positive exchange of ideas. Rubin’s first TEDx talk was in 2015 at Popejoy Hall in front of about 1,200 people. She says she thinks it was the most people she’d ever addressed at one time. The title of that lecture was “Good Goodbye,” and her presentation discussed the importance of planning ahead for end-of-life issues. This year she will be talking about medical aid in dying.
“Starting in April of 2023, I had eight deaths in my family, including one with medical aid in dying. And as a death educator, you would think I’d be prepared, and I was prepared, but I was also kind of overwhelmed with grief after the last two deaths, which were unexpected and sudden. So, yes, I needed to take my own advice and actually get some grief support.”
Rubin says New Mexico has had medical aid in dying since June of 2021. According to Rubin, patients receive a combination of five powerful drugs that “basically ease the patient into unconsciousness,” relaxing them, slowing breathing and stopping the heart. She says it’s something that a patient has to request and must be able to ingest on their own.
“One of the things that I did back in April – on the second anniversary of my husband’s death – is I worked with a guy up in Santa Fe who does psychedelic-assisted therapy. So I did a session on that anniversary, and it made a huge difference, because I was walking around under a cloud of anger and grief and not really realizing it. I was able to get through the valley of the shadow of death, and I have been in such a good mood ever since.”
“A TED talk is very different from just a conference talk or something that you would give anywhere else, because it’s really boiled down to the essence of the core idea, and it’s designed to get people thinking about it and applying it in a little bit of a different way,” Adams says. “It’s not about here’s my company or here’s my thing, it’s here’s my raw idea and what I think it can do in the world.”
For a full list of presenters and bios visit tedxabq.com/2025-main-event
You can purchase ticket at www.zeffy.com/en-US/ticketing/tedxabq-2025-curiosity
TEDxABQ
Sept. 27, 12 to 6:30 p.m.
Electric Playhouse
5201 Ouray Rd. NW