Most festivals are designed for their audience to sit, watch, and listen. It's a tried and true formula, though to be frank, that might be better considered "tired" and true festival formula!
I'm talking about the first ever Original Thinkers Festival experience. It's a little bit Cannes, a little bit TedTalk, and a lot about social ingenuity.
The weekend’s lineup consists of 10 shows featuring top-flight speakers and films that are woven around a distinct and cogent theme, each with the overall frame of original thinking.
Original Thinkers will push its audience out of their comfort zones and towards new experiences, leaving them energized and motivated.
Change via social interaction and wellness
The festival was created to enable smart, astute people to meet in the mountains, to bring together stories and ideas to ignite change.
While this may sound simple, it's actually driven industry giants such as HBO, Salon Magazine and Lyft are just a few of the organizations which have stepped up as official sponsors of this trailblazing event.
You know, David Holbrooke, filmmaker and creative entrepreneur, might just be on to something here, but he's not doing it alone.
Holbrooke is being helped by Nancy Shafer, who created and operated the burgeoning SXSW Film Festival for eight years before running the famed Tribeca Film Festival for 11 years. As well as Gabriel Lifton-Zoline who successfully ran Obama’s Colorado campaigns in 2008 and 2012 and moved into being a media executive who helped build RYOT.org.
Guests & Speakers
Guests from across the spectrum will be on site for the occasion, from authors, journalists, Tony Award and Emmy Award-winners, musicians and Pulitzer Prize winners, photographers, philosophers and survivors, doctors and activists, teachers, filmmakers and poets, and yes...even a NASA astronaut.
(For a full list of speakers, including Jeffrey Wright of WestWorld, author Jedediah Jenkins, NASA astronaut and engineer Joe Tanner and more, please visit originalthinkers.com/guests.)
Original Thinkers is a new breed of festival
It is built to offer its audience a unique perspective on some of the crucial issues of our time, while also engaging them on how to have a real and tangible impact.
So much of that will depend on our community of Original Thinkers who will assemble in Telluride, Colorado and leave at the end of the weekend, changed and charged to make a real difference.
Over the course of the four day festival, the OT community will gather and grow through shared experiences and engaging content.
Check out the full list of shows, guests and films, and find out how to get tickets over at OriginalThinkers.com!