Annina Collier

I was a geeky, bookish nerd who joined the school orchestra in fifth grade to get out of gym class. I’ve been obsessed with the arts ever since. The arts have given me friendship and community, paid for my education, taken me around the world, helped me communicate with people from different cultures, given me a career, and introduced me to my husband. I believe everyone should be involved in creating things, and I’m especially interested in helping people who think they aren’t creative or artistic find a creative outlet. Young children are creative beings. We all instinctively sang, danced, and drew, and we loved it. But as we grow up, not only do we stop doing these things, we often think we can’t do them. That’s why I created the “I Can’t” workshop series at the Center for Creativity in downtown Tulsa. These free lunchtime workshops let people try everything from drawing to dance to digital fabrication. The goal is to get people to get outside their comfort zones, use different parts of their brains, and perhaps discover a new interest or hobby. I’ve convened arts organizations from across the city to bring these workshops to the public, in order to showcase what the community has to offer while giving people new arts experiences. In addition to program development, I run an exhibition space in my role as the Dean of the Center for Creativity. Our most unusual art exhibition was called “Please Touch the Art.” This exhibition engaged all five senses, with a focus on accessibility for people who are blind or visually impaired. One of the best feelings I’ve had was at the exhibition opening, looking around the space and seeing hundreds of people touching, smelling, and even tasting the art. Many people commented that this was the first time they’d been able to experience an art exhibition. While my artistic career began in the performing arts, I now feel most fulfilled when helping facilitate creative experiences for others. I still play music, dance, and fill notebooks with abstract doodles, but I most enjoy helping you discover the joy of doing those things, too.

TED’s mission to spread ideas meshes well with the mission of the Center for Creativity: to ignite the creative spirit through education, collaboration, and inspiration. The diversity of a TEDx event appeals to me, as I love working on multidisciplinary projects that bring together unusual collaborators to approach a problem in an innovative way. In the past two and a half years at the Center for Creativity, I’ve worked with nonprofits that provide services to women with breast cancer, underserved schoolchildren, LGBTQ youth, and people living with HIV and AIDS. I’ve formed partnerships with the Chickasaw Nation, 1 Million Cups, the Woody Guthrie Center, the Alzheimer’s Association, an MIT-chartered fabrication lab, and more than a dozen arts organizations. I’m at my best when fostering collaborations, and our TEDx event will be a community-wide collaboration that showcases unusual voices and ideas. Our goal is to give a platform to unheard voices that will cause the audience to think about things differently and inspire them to be more curious.