From UCLA Today:

UCLA World Arts and Cultures|Dance Professor David Gere has traveled the globe for nearly a decade with his Make Art/Stop AIDS project to deliver his impassioned message about ending the epidemic. But he’s making a point of staying home next week to give an 18-minute presentation here on campus for TEDxUCLA, an event that will be widely seen via its connection to the popular “TEDTalks.”
 
“You’d have to be living under a rock with no Internet to have missed the TED phenomenon,” said Gere. Since its 1984 inception in Silicon Valley, TEDTalks has hosted and videotaped nearly 1,400 mini-lectures by experts and notables worldwide and found a voracious audience for its 18-minute clips on the TED website, YouTube and iTunes.
 
“Good ideas are exciting and infectious,” said Gere. “TED has found the perfect way to package those ideas — bigger than a sound bite, shorter than a lecture. A perfectly sized idea meal.”

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David Gere, Ph.D., is director of the UCLA Art & Global Health Center and is a professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, where he teaches courses in arts activism. In 2004, Gere founded MAKE ART/STOP AIDS, an international network of artists intervening in the AIDS epidemic, and since 2007 has co-directed Through Positive Eyes, an internationally recognized participatory photography project created by people living with HIV and AIDS. Gere’s How to Make Dances in an Epidemic: Tracking Choreography in the Age of AIDS (University of Wisconsin Press, 2004) received the award for outstanding publication from the Congress on Research in Dance. The book was also nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and received a special citation from the Society of Dance History Scholars and the De la Torre Bueno Prize. Gere studied music, dance, and Tamil in Madurai, South India, on an Oberlin Shansi Fellowship 1980-82 and, in 2004, lived in Bangalore, India, on a research grant from the Fulbright Association, studying the ways in which artists are working in India to stop the AIDS epidemic. He now travels frequently between Los Angeles and project sites in New Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Johannesburg, Zomba (Malawi), Mexico City, and Rio de Janeiro, creating, supporting, and theorizing experimental projects with funding from the Ford Foundation, Andy Warhol Foundation, and the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), among other grants.