Danielle Colby in TEDxDavenport 2026 at the Last Picture House -- August 12.
Wednesday, August 12, 4:30 p.m.
The Last Picture House, 325 East Second Street, Davenport IA
In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, the city's The Last Picture House will host the August 12 event TEDxDavenport, a local, self-organized event that brings people together to share a TED-like experience, and that will find six gifted speakers – including Quad Cities residents – sparking deep discussion and connection through a number of fascinating subjects.
This year's lineup of scheduled TEDxDavenport speakers includes:
Aiden Landman on “Flying Light: A Music Professional’s Guide to the Cities of the Future.” Landman is an international touring music professional, hobbyist cat farmer, amateur historian, and enthusiastic civic futurist. He’s flown around the world the long way. Twice. A proud product of western Illinois rural flatlands, Landman currently lives in the Quad Cities with his wife, Chelsea, and house cat, Ladybird.
Every day massive entertainment tours arrive in cities across the world and create unique settings, exciting memories, and miles of infrastructure out of thin air. International production professional Aiden Landman has spent his career backstage solving the high-stakes logistical puzzles of world tours. Now he is opening his technical rider for America’s cities of the future. Drawing from a high-stakes flight from Chicago to Paris, Landman explores how cutting the weight of stagnation and checklist expectation and embracing the lean, imaginative approach of a world-class production can enable cities to stop being fly-overs and start headlining in their own right.
Danielle Colby on “What is an Ecdysiast and why does it matter?” Colby is a multifaceted television personality, burlesque entertainer, entrepreneur, and passionate collector, best known for her role on the History's hit reality series, American Pickers. Born on December 3, 1975, in Davenport, Iowa, Danielle grew up surrounded by her family's love for antiques and unique items. This early exposure sparked her lifelong interest in collecting and preserving history through artifacts. Before her television debut, Danielle pursued various artistic and performance-based interests. She founded, produced and performed in a burlesque troupe based out of the Iowa and Illinois collective Mississippi River towns of the Quad Cities. which helped her develop a strong stage presence and a keen sense of storytelling. Danielle continues to travel throughout the world performing Burlesque and plans to continue celebrating this art form long into the future.
Feathers, sequins and sky-high headdresses may be the hallmarks of the showgirl, but her legacy is woven from far more than sparkle. For generations, she has stood as a symbol of reinvention. Beneath the glamour runs a cultural lineage that stretches from the cabarets of 19th-century Paris, through Broadway’s Ziegfeld Follies and the stages of Las Vegas.
Etore Ewen on “How I Got Over.” Ewen is a broadcaster, actor and global television personality best known as WWE Superstar “Big E” where he held the WWE World Championship and Tag Team Championship title as part of the mega-popular group The New Day. Ettore made his feature film debut in F Plus, a film featuring Randy Couture, Tommy Davidson, and Jennifer Esposito, while his voice work can be found in Disney+'s Your Friendly Neighborhood Spiderman and Adult Swim’s Lazor Wulf. Ettore has been seen across every major network, appearing on game shows like Wheel of Fortune and Family Feud, award shows like The Kids Choice Awards, variety shows and beyond. As a public figure, Ettore champions mental health awareness, along with the importance of empathy in sports. He is known by many as a sports entertainer, actor, producer, and motivational speaker.
His TedxDavenport talk will find Ewen “sharing my struggles with major depressive disorder and psychosis, and my eventual healing through medication, hospitalization, ECTs, talk therapy, and mindfulness/meditation.
Alisha Espey on “Pay Attention.” Espey is a storyteller, placemaking professional, and event organizer based in the Quad Cities. A believer in the power of connection and belonging, she leads programs and events, including the Alternating Currents festival. Inspired by her relationship with her sister Kara, her TEDx talk explores what people we often underestimate can teach us about attention, joy, and love.
What if the people we often underestimate have something essential to teach us about how to live? Through reflections on her relationship with her sister Kara, Alisha Espey explores what attention, ordinary moments and unconditional love can reveal about a meaningful life. In a culture shaped by distraction and striving, this talk invites us to pay attention and reconsider where wisdom lives.
Padmini Soni on “Who Catches AI's Mistakes When You Don't Know What to Look For?” Soni is a Senior AI Strategist, speaker, and founder of Rezonance AI, where she helps organizations design and implement responsible AI solutions aligned withreal-world business goals.
AI is now part of how millions of people find information, make decisions, and move through daily life, often before anyone has taught them how to question it. The danger is not that people are careless. It is that AI may be the most confident, fluent, and helpful tool we have ever encountered, yet it can be wrong in ways that leave no warning and no trace. Drawing on her work in Responsible AI, Padmini explores why AI literacy is no longer a niche skill, offering a simple framework to help people shift their relationship with AI from passive trust to active critical thinking. Because the future of responsible AI depends not just on how these systems are designed, but also on whether the people using them know when to question them.
Brantley Hall on “What a Million Farts Can Teach Us.” Hall is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cell Biology and Molecular Genetics at the University of Maryland. His lab studies electron flow in the human gutmicrobiome, which leads to a surprisingly funny topic: flatulence, which is predominantly caused by the outputs of gut microbial metabolism.
Flatulence is produced almost entirely by the gut microbiome and carries real information about digestion and gut health, but it has never been measured at scale. To change that, Brantley Hall and his team built a wearable biosensor and launched the Human Flatus Atlas, a study mapping gut microbial gas production across thousands of people. In this talk, he shares what the Human Flatus Atlas is beginning to reveal, and why measuring a million farts could meaning fully advance our understanding of digestion, the gut-brain axis, and human health.
TEDxDavenport 2026 will begin at Davenport's Capitol Theatre on August 12 at 4:30 p.m., admission is $37.45-107, and reservations are available by visiting TedXDavenport.com.
