Dent 2023 Speakers (So Far!)
Suzanne Fricke
Suzanne Newman Fricke has a doctorate in Native American art history from the University of New Mexico. For the past 30 years, she taught art history and worked as a curator, putting together museum shows exhibited in the United States and abroad. She has written articles published in different journals and her book of interviews, As We See It: Interviews with 10 Native American Photographers, will be published in 2023. In 2020, Dr. Fricke opened Gallery Hózhó at Hotel Chaco, a fine art gallery dedicated to contemporary art from New Mexico.
Gary Ware
Gary Ware, Founder of Breakthrough Play, is a corporate facilitator, keynote speaker, certified coach, and author of the book Playful Rebellion: Maximize Workplace Success Through The Power of Play. Gary has over 14 years of experience in the corporate world holding various leadership positions. Being a multifaceted individual Gary also comes with nearly a decade of experience as a performer in improv theatre. After experiencing burnout in his pursuit for success and happiness, he realized that what was missing was play. Committing to a life of play is what led Gary to discover his passion for facilitating. Gary uses the power of applied improvisation and other playful methods to assist people in unlocking creativity, confidence, and better communication. Gary was recently featured as one of the Top 100 HR influencers of 2021 by the Engagedly HR software platform. When Gary isn't leading workshops or speaking, you can find him learning magic or off on an adventure with his wife Courtney and sons Garrett and Cameron.
Adam Sachs
Adam Sachs is an award winning pizzaiolo and bread baker. His pizza game took a sharp turn in 2014, when he started to work with Tony Gemignani. Since then, he has collaborated on pizza classes, workshops, demonstrations, videos and books, competed nationally and internationally, and was invited to join the World Pizza Champions team. His favorite style of pizza changes with the weather, and to keep things interesting, he makes pasta for several Bay Area restaurants. Follow him on Instagram.
Tashia Mallette
Tashia Mallette is the Founder and Principal Chief People Officer at the HR Exchange Group, a humanresources consulting firm providing strategy, design and technology implementation services to companies looking to scale. Tashia also serves as the Vice President, People and Culture for Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator (LACI). She has held progressive HR leadership roles over the last 20 years, spending half of her career as the Chief People Officer for Therabody, SAG-AFTRA and ServiceSource. Tashia provides innovative solutions to solve complex business opportunities by leveraging her diverse experience across industries and operating environments. An active member in the HR community, Tashia is the current Membership Chair for PIHRA’s South Bay chapter, UCLA SHRM student chapter mentor and SHRM HR Magazine contributor. Tashia holds a Master’s degree in Organization Development & Change from Penn State University, Bachelor’s degree in Communications from Monmouth University and is SHRM-SCP certified.
Fernando Olea
Originally from Mexico City, Chef Fernando Olea, formerly Chef/Owner of Epazote Restaurant and Bert’s La Taqueria, has been enthralling diners in Santa Fe since 1991. Chef Olea creates sophisticated flavors using Old Mexico’s indigenous and culinary traditions alongside ingredients from around the world for his “New World” cuisine. He is honored to have won the National Restaurant Association’s “Faces of Diversity Award” in 2020 and the James Beard award for “Best Chef, Southwest” in 2022.
He has been actively involved in the local community while representing the Mexican culinary culture in Santa Fe and abroad. Some of the organizations and events he has been involved in include: Past President of the Santa Fe Wine & Chile Fiesta 2016-2017, Iron Chef Participant, Toronto, Canada, President, Founder of the Mexican Restaurant Association of the US & Canada, Past President and CEO of the New Mexico Restaurant Association, Recognized by Former First Lady, Michelle Obama, for his involvement in the Cooking With Kids organization.
Chef Olea is well known for his exquisite moles, a sauce of complex flavors that usually includes toasted and ground spices, seeds, nuts, chocolate and chile. Many mole recipes contain more than thirty ingredients and some recipes have five varieties of chile alone. Chef Olea is delighted to share his moles with you at his current restaurant, Sazón, in Santa Fe, NM. Follow him on Instagram.
Rick Smolan
Rick Smolan, CEO of Against All Odds Productions, is a #1 New York Times best-selling author and a Time, Life and National Geographic photojournalist best known as the co-creator of the “Day in The Life” and “America 24/7” series.
Against All Odds Productions specializes in the design and execution of large-scale photographic projects which combine compelling story-telling with state-of-the-art technology. Fortune Magazine describes Against All Odds as “One of the 25 Coolest Companies in America.”
Charles Van Kirk
Audio engineer and musician Charles Van Kirk says, “My job is to tell stories with sound.”
“My work asks the question: what roles can sound and music play in combating climate change? In an attempt to answer this, I create music from environmental sources and found-sounds. I have written songs using the sounds of Icelandic glaciers, geothermal energy sources, Slovenia grape harvests and the sounds of bicycling across the USA.”
Lauren Miller, p/k/a Malibu Babie
Artist-in-Residence Lauren Miller, p/k/a Malibu Babie’s unconventional path to making chart topping hits began as a young girl. The daughter of construction workers, she excelled in dance and academics as a child in the small town of Olympia, WA, going on to graduate cum laude from Vanderbilt University as a first generation college student and All SEC Dancer. After graduation, she experienced a massive gut check, and decided to trade in her diploma for a dream.
Starting as an intern on the iconic Music Row in Nashville, TN, the dichotomy of her hip hop sensibilities and bubbly pop aura made waves as she began her diversion into the music industry as a songwriter, artist, and producer. Since we last saw her in Santa Fe at the 2019 Dent conference, she has become the first and only female this century to debut at #1 on Billboard’s Hip Hop Charts after producing back to back singles for superstar artists Nicki Minaj (‘Super Freaky Girl’) and Megan Thee Stallion (‘Her’). In March, she teamed up with five-time Grammy award-winning legend Shania Twain to produce the country icon’s remix “Giddy Up!” in celebration of Women’s History Month. Her own singles have amassed millions of uses as viral audios on Tik Tok and Instagram, and she recently packed out her first festival alongside pop princesses Christina Aguilera and Anitta. Even Times Square has taken notice, with Spotify giving her a Billboard alongside the honor of being named their ‘Equal’ global ambassador- a program that celebrates female creatives, who are still very much underrepresented in the music industry.
Amy Salzhauer
Amy Salzhauer is a Founder and Managing Partner at Good Growth Capital, a majority women-owned venture capital fund that is known for its world-leading expertise in technology commercialization, and for finding, funding and growing superior, defensible technology companies that fill pressing societal needs. She was previously the CEO of Ignition Ventures, where she helped start companies worth over US $1 billion out of science labs in areas such as chip-based fuel cells, self-organizing networks, selective brain cooling, and advanced materials.
Amy is an inventor who holds several patents, speaks internationally about entrepreneurship and leadership, and serves on multiple for-profit and non-profit boards, including GGC portfolio companies Leuko, Obsidio, and Coagulo and as Treasurer of the Roper St Francis Hospital Foundation Board and the Advisory Board of the Arizona State University Interplanetary Initiative. Her prior experience also includes writing for magazines like Newsweek, Science, Technology Review, and Harvard Business Review and serving as the Assistant Director of a non-profit environmental organization in Washington D.C. Her many recognitions include being selected by the World Economic Forum as one of its one hundred top “Global Leaders for Tomorrow," and being chosen multiple times as a top “40 Under 40” business leader. Amy holds an MBA from MIT; an M.Phil in Plant Sciences from Cambridge University where she was a Herschel Smith Harvard Scholar; and an A.B. magna cum laude from Harvard University.
Daniel C. Dennett
Daniel C. Dennett, the author of Breaking the Spell (Viking, 2006), Freedom Evolves (Viking Penguin, 2003) and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (Simon & Schuster, 1995), is University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He lives with his wife in Maine, and has a daughter, a son, and five grandchildren. He was born in Boston in 1942, the son of a historian by the same name, and received his B.A. in philosophy from Harvard in 1963. He then went to Oxford to work with Gilbert Ryle, under whose supervision he completed the D.Phil. in philosophy in 1965. He taught at U.C. Irvine from 1965 to 1971, when he moved to Tufts, where he has taught ever since, aside from periods visiting at Harvard, Pittsburgh, Oxford, the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, the London School of Economics and the American University of Beirut. He is currently a member of the external faculty of the Santa Fe Institute and New College of the Humanities in London.
Photo: Phil Wickens.
M.H. Rubin
M. H. Rubin has been a photographer and collector for more than 40 years, a new Santa Fe local after decades in the Bay Area. As a young protégé of Jerry Uelsmann, he began by creating surreal analog images. Today Rubin embraces the passion of the amateur and evangelizes photographic exploration for consumers. He is the director of a large collection of classical 20th-century works, always incorporated into his lectures, and has spent the past years developing a new curriculum in photographic education. His book The Photograph as Haiku was released in 2023.
Concurrent with photography, he has had an entrepreneurial career that has spanned industries such as publishing, consumer retail, entertainment media, and technology. Career highlights include Lucasfilm, Netflix, and Adobe. He has had editing and post-production roles on numerous television and movie projects, including the miniseries “Lonesome Dove,” and the Bertolucci feature “The Sheltering Sky.”
Rubin has a degree in neuroscience from Brown University. He is a colorful storyteller and entertaining educator, the author of numerous essays and books—including a history of Lucasfilm and Pixar Droidmaker: George Lucas and the Digital Revolution.
David Preston
David Preston, Ph.D. is an educator, speaker, writer, and consultant who has designed learning experiences for 30 years. David is the author of ACADEMY OF ONE (2021, Rowman & Littlefield) and the founder of Open-Source Learning. You can connect with David via his website at https://davidpreston.net.
In 2004 David ventured into the cave of everyone’s darkest learning fears and began teaching high school courses in Los Angeles. He broke the rules to connect students with online resources, each other, and even themselves. Over time, David’s approach became known as Open-Source Learning. He has applied the model to create interdisciplinary academies and support high-performing individuals and organizations. David wrote ACADEMY OF ONE (2021, Rowman and Littlefield) and he has shared Open-Source Learning with audiences at the O’Reilly OSCON, the Macarthur Digital Learning and Media Conference, the Connected Learning Summit at MIT, TEDxUCLA, the Royal Geographical Society, and the Institute for the Future. David has also developed online platforms and free open source software to support Open-Source Learning communities.
Virgil Ortiz
Virgil Ortiz is not just any artist; he's a trailblazer in the fusion of art, fashion, video, and film. Known as one of the groundbreaking potters of his era, Ortiz's masterpieces have been showcased in renowned museums globally, from the Stedelijk Museum in The Netherlands to the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. Growing up as the youngest of six in a household where pottery and storytelling were daily activities, Virgil found inspiration in his family's deep-rooted traditions. His grandmother, Laurencita Herrera, and his mother, Seferina Ortiz, both stood out as iconic Pueblo potters. To Virgil, it was just daily life, recalling, “I didn’t even know it was art being produced when I was growing up."
Yet, he doesn't just stick to tradition. Ortiz breathes fresh life into Cochiti pottery traditions, blending them with a contemporary twist that draws from his rich Pueblo heritage, science fiction vibes, and his unique tales. Fresh off winning the 2022 Museum of Indian Arts and Culture’s Living Treasure Award, Virgil also celebrated the launch of his book "Virgil Ortiz: ReVOlution." This mid-career retrospective peels back the curtain on his transformative art journey, giving readers a glimpse into his dynamic blend of tradition and futurism. Whether it's through pottery, activism, or storytelling, Ortiz keeps pushing boundaries, ensuring his culture's stories are told in fresh, innovative ways.
Ortiz was featured in an Indigenous Futurisms panel hosted by Dent at San Diego Comic-Con in 2023.
Angela Antony
Angela Antony is on a mission to revolutionize the way we hire talent, guiding you to think differently about talent, potential, and diversity in the workplace. She is the founder and CEO of Scoutible, a game-based hiring platform that uses artificial intelligence to discover the best candidates for any job. As people play Scoutible’s immersive video games, Scoutible can measure unique cognitive and personality traits and match people with their dream careers.
Angela has a passion for psychology, law, and business. She spent nine years at Harvard, earning a B.A. in Psychology with Highest Honors, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. She also worked at the White House, where she focused on labor market policy.
Angela is a visionary leader and an award-winning entrepreneur. She won the MTV Young Creators Award, the G-Startup Worldwide 2016 Competition, and was featured in Fast Company, Tech Crunch, Entrepreneur Magazine, U.S. News & World Report, Businessweek, Young Money Magazine, and PBS. She has also attracted the attention and support of Mark Cuban, NEA, and other top investors who share her vision for the future of work.