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Kimberly Hickok Smith is a consummate international trade and development specialist with over 30 years of hands on experience in all aspects of strategic management, trade and business development, marketing and market linkages, food security and livelihood development across the African continent, including over 20 years of resident work in East Africa. Kimberly is the founder of several companies worldwide involved in the complete global value chain and has served as president, vice president and MD of several small, medium and large scale private enterprises with staff levels from 15 to 480 in the US and Africa. Her extensive knowledge and extraordinary relationships with key players on the Continent including private sector, Government and leading organizations such as the AUC, COMESA and East African governments, have helped her successfully run seven major Africa regional and East African development projects funded by USAID.

Kimberly’s overarching desire to end poverty and hunger have been aided through her expertise in leadership, value chain development, organizational strategy and communications, capacity building for organizational development, trade promotion, resource mobilization and income generation. Among the member organizations she has been privileged to assist in developing sustainability and profitability are TAHA (horticulture), EAFCA (coffee), ESADA (dairy), EAGC (grains) , Kenya Agribusiness and Agri-Industry Alliance (KAAA) and of course YEO.

Kimberly is a highly regarded facilitator and negotiator and consultant in wide ranging fields to generate employment, improve livelihoods, increase incomes, and improve food security and sustainability. Her keen interest in conservation and has led several initiatives to protect wildlife and preserve natural resources and her work with children includes co-founding It’s a Girl Thing with her daughters, Alexandra and Kim.

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Grammy-winning choral composer and conductor Eric Whitacre is known for working at the nexus of art and technology. In this intensely humanistic — yet highly code-dependent — space, he finds profound, universal wisdom about leadership, collaboration, community building, and nurturing the creative process. Charismatic and captivating, he has been commissioned by NASA for a far-reaching project soon to be revealed.

He was appointed the Los Angeles Master Chorale’s first Artist-in-Residence. The two-year post began with the 2016-2017 season.

Eric is best known for creating technologically innovative musical arrangements, like the Hubble Space Telescope-inspired Deep Field, and his groundbreaking Virtual Choirs, which have been heard by tens of millions of people around the globe. Beautifully composed, gorgeously performed, and imaginatively wrought, Eric’s haunting, complex works exemplify his message that technology can be used to foster connections and help broaden the reach of art and human expression.

The inspiration for the Deep Field choral composition, commissioned by the BBC for their annual series of concerts, was the Hubble’s pictures of our early universe. To accompany the singers, Eric conceived of an app to engage the audience as collaborators. At a critical juncture in the performance, the theater goes dark and listeners’ smartphones emit sound and light to complement the voices and create the cosmos-like atmosphere.

Eric’s Virtual Choir projects connected thousands of Internet-sourced voices via video, challenging him to virtually replicate the very physical conductor-choir intimacy. Immediate international sensations, these performances afforded unprecedented inclusion — to all races and nationalities, the geographically remote, the physically challenged, the emotionally vulnerable, and even those under restrictive political regimes. They inspired self-organizing groups, where teams helped each other audition, rehearse, and work out tech problems.

Though virtual, these “spheres of magic” provided the emotional satisfactions of connection, belonging, and accomplishment and teach lessons about inclusion, global team building, and how to motivate diverse people to collaborate toward a common goal.

Eric continuously explores the nature of creativity. He speaks to art and vulnerability, to code as a medium for human expression, to the Golden Mean as the perfect creative structure, and to what he terms “the Golden Brick” — the first kernel of any creative endeavor. His work at this intersection of science and art includes a study with the Centre of Performance Science at the Royal College of Music and Imperial College, which helped prove music’s role in stress-reduction and building the immune system.

Whether speaking about successful collaboration, or the stages of the creative process, Eric imparts inspiration and valuable insights for creators, technologists, project managers and general audiences.

Eric’s own musical journey started comparatively late when, as a college freshman, he joined the choir to meet “hot sopranos” — and was forever transformed by Mozart’s Requiem and by the shared emotional connection of choral singing. Soon, he was composing his own works, and was eventually accepted to the prestigious Julliard School.

Eric has written for many of the world’s most prestigious orchestras and artists, including Stephen Schwarz, Annie Lennox, and Laura Mvula. His musical, Paradise Lost: Shadows and Wings, won the ASCAP Harold Arlen Award and the Richard Rodgers Award. His album Light & Gold won the Grammy Award for Best Choral Performance and his album Water Night went straight to #1 on the iTunes Classical Music chart on its day of release. As a conductor, Eric has performed on five continents and was been a Composer in Residence at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.

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