TEDxWoodstock

06/18/2026

Teachers don't just share ideas. They protect the conditions that make ideas possible.
Every year, thanks to our generous sponsors at the Rauch Foundation, we offer complimentary tickets to educators because if "Art Is…" is the conversation, teachers belong in the room.

Are you an educator? Know one? Send them our way.

DM us or visit the link in bio to learn more.

06/17/2026

When we chose the theme "Art Is…" we knew we needed a voice that had lived it fully, uncompromisingly, for over sixty years.

Twyla Tharp has choreographed more than 160 works. Broadway. Ballet. Film. She's received the National Medal of the Arts and a Kennedy Center Honor. She has spent a lifetime arguing, through her body, her work, her words, that creativity is not a gift. It's a practice.

We are honored to welcome her to TEDxWoodstock on June 27th.

If you've ever wondered what it means to build a creative life, she has something to say to you.

🎟️ Tickets at the link in bio.

06/16/2026

Here’s the full schedule for our next TEDxWoodstock event on June 27th! Visit the link in our bio to reserve your tickets today.

06/12/2026

Robert DuGrenier has lived and worked in Townshend, Vermont since the late 1990s, when he and his wife Kathy left New York City to settle on Taft Hill Farm, a 100-acre historic property on the West River whose original farmhouse dates to 1790. He runs a solar-powered glassblowing studio on Route 30 where you can walk in and watch him work.

What he makes there is genuinely extraordinary. His custom glass installations and chandeliers are installed in hotels, stores, museums, and private residences around the world. There's a frosted glass elevator shaft at the Paris Ritz depicting scenes from the Napoleonic Wars. Chandeliers at the Divan Hotel in Istanbul. A serpentine glass installation running the length of the bar at London's Dorchester Hotel. And closer to home, his gallery sells hand blown glass shells he designed as homes for hermit crabs, a product that turned out to advance scientific research on the species.
In 1984, he was commissioned to produce the 1/12th scale model from which French artisans sculpted the new flame for the 1986 Centennial Restoration of the Statue of Liberty.

He is also the postmaster of West Townshend.

That’s not a joke. When the West Townshend Country Store closed and the town was about to lose its post office, DuGrenier helped lead the effort to save it. Working with the Preservation Trust of Vermont, the community formed a nonprofit, found an angel investor, and brought the building back to life. It now runs a donation-based café, a thrift shop, an incubator kitchen, a farmers market, and a Friday pizza night built around a wood-fired outdoor oven that DuGrenier helped build.

The Paris Ritz and the West Townshend pizza night. Both are art. Both are community. Both are Robert DuGrenier.

Join us on June 27th as he takes the stage at TEDx Woodstock and takes us on a journey of creation and recreation. Link in bio.

06/11/2026

This is the power of art. AWESOME!
♥️✨👏🏼

Live performance persists amid the Russian onslaught, not as a commentary on the war but as an active response to it.

06/10/2026

Meet Mica Celeste, one of this year’s TEDx Woodstock speakers.

Mica is a Vermont-based painter whose work centers on bold composition, color, and large-scale form. She came to painting after a turning point in her life, building her practice outside of traditional institutions through consistent, self-directed work.

A longtime member of the Woodstock community, Mica has served in civic leadership roles, contributed to conversations about the town's future, and now joins the TEDxWoodstock lineup as a local artist.

At TEDxWoodstock: Art Is..., Mica brings a perspective rooted in both creativity and community. In a year when TEDxWoodstock is exploring the many ways art shapes our lives, her presence reflects a core idea behind this event:

Art doesn't exist apart from community.

It helps build it.

Join us on June 27 (link in bio).

06/09/2026

What happens when people gather around ideas?

Looking back at past TEDx events, we're reminded that some of the most meaningful moments don't happen on stage, they happen in the spaces between talks. Around tables, in hallways, over coffee, during the conversations that continue long after the microphones are turned off.

TEDx began as a way to share ideas worth spreading. Here in Woodstock, it has also become a way to build connections worth keeping.

Since our earliest TEDxHartlandHill (now TEDxWoodstock) events, we've brought together artists, educators, entrepreneurs, students, activists, community leaders, and curious minds from all walks of life to explore big questions about community, purpose, wonder, and what it means to live well. Those conversations remain at the heart of what we do.

As we prepare for 2026 TEDxWoodstock: Art Is... on June 27th, we're carrying that spirit forward.

Not just a stage.

Not just a series of talks.

A gathering of people who are curious about the world and one another.

Because ideas matter.

But what we do with them together matters even more.

Link in bio for more information.

06/08/2026

SPEAKER | Rodney Marsalis
What happens when you're born into one of the most celebrated musical families in America... and choose a different road?

For Rodney Marsalis, the answer wasn't rebellion.
It was authenticity.

Growing up in a family synonymous with jazz, Rodney was surrounded by extraordinary talent from an early age. The Marsalis name carries a remarkable musical legacy, with family members helping shape the landscape of modern jazz for generations. Yet Rodney's journey led him toward a different artistic calling: the world of classical music.

Choosing your own path isn't always easy, especially when expectations arrive before you've even had a chance to introduce yourself.

But art has a way of asking difficult questions:
Who are you when nobody else gets to answer for you?
What voice is uniquely yours?
And what happens when you have the courage to follow it?

At TEDxWoodstock: Art Is..., Rodney Marsalis will explore a life spent honoring a family legacy while also creating one of his own. His story is about more than music. It's about identity, individuality, and the quiet bravery of becoming yourself.

Because art isn't imitation.

Art is discovery.

Join us on June 27 as Rodney shares his perspective on finding your own sound in a world eager to tell you what it should be.

Link in bio.

06/05/2026

SPEAKER | DEBBIE TAYLOR-KERMAN: Earlier this year, nineteen Buddhist monks walked 2,300 miles across America.

They started in Fort Worth, Texas in October. They walked through Houston and the Deep South, through snowstorms and ice, through the Bible Belt and up the Eastern Seaboard. They walked in saffron robes. Their leader walked barefoot. They were accompanied by a rescue dog named Aloka, who had joined them on a previous pilgrimage in India and never really left.

They completed their journey in February, arriving at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., where nearly 3,500 people packed an arena to greet them and stayed completely silent as they entered, as a gesture of respect.

Millions of people followed them on social media. Not because it was spectacular, but because it was the opposite. In a country shaped by political division, conflict, and societal trauma, the monks offered something rare: a procession of people asking for nothing, giving blessings, accepting flowers, practicing peace as a daily physical act.
Debbie Taylor-Kerman was one of the people watching.

A Scottish-born abstract painter living in Harlem, Debbie has spent her career making art about the people who don't get seen enough — subway riders, essential workers, families of every shape, love of every kind. Her paintings are built in layers: collage, paint, history pressed together until something human emerges from the surface.

When she saw the monks walking, she went to her studio and started painting.

The result is a whole new body of work, her Walk for Peace collection, made in direct response to what she witnessed: the monks, the flowers, the dog, the crowds kneeling on the side of the highway as they passed.

This is what art does that nothing else can. It receives something the world offers, holds it, and gives it back transformed.

Debbie will be on the TEDx Woodstock stage on June 27th. Link in bio for tickets.

06/04/2026

You've probably heard of TED Talks.

Maybe you've watched one at 11pm when you couldn't sleep and ended up crying about octopus intelligence or rethinking everything you thought you knew about grief. That's kind of the point.

TED stands for Technology, Education, and Design, but it's really just a platform for ideas worth sharing. Eighteen minutes. One person. One idea. Just a human being standing on a red dot, telling the truth about something they know deeply.

TEDx events are independently organized, TED-licensed versions of that same experience happening in cities and small towns all over the world, every single day.

And one of them happens right here.

TEDxWoodstock (formerly TEDxHartlandHill) has been gathering our community since 2022, bringing together scientists, artists, farmers, teachers, and thinkers from Vermont and beyond.

We've talked about what community actually means when things fall apart. We've asked how to live a life worth living. We've sat with awe (the quiet kind and the kind that knocks you sideways).
This year, we're moving to the Pentangle Arts stage, and the question we're living inside is: What is art, really?

Not just what hangs on walls, but what holds people together? What resists? What survives?

If you've ever felt like ideas matter and that where you live shouldn't determine whether you get to be in the room, TEDx Woodstock is for you.

Link in bio.