Meet the speakers
“All of Us : The Future Needs A Room” is a private city-room for the people shaping how Malaysia thinks, builds, leads and remembers.
Held at Park Hyatt Kuala Lumpur, TEDxBukit Bintang begins with a simple conviction: the future cannot be discussed through markets, sectors or demographics alone. It must make room for the full complexity of people, including their cultures, histories, needs, knowledge systems and contradictions.
Raven Kwok
Specialty Coffee Educator and Sustainability Advocate
What can a cup teach us to notice?
Raven Kwok has spent more than 11 years learning to understand coffee from several directions: as a roaster, trainer, sensory practitioner and educator.
As Co-founder and Director of Earthlings Coffee, where he is Head Coffee Trainer and Designer, Raven combines scientific rigour with a deep curiosity about coffee’s origins, production and the people and communities behind each cup.
His work often begins with questions of flavour and quality. Follow those questions far enough, however, and they can lead somewhere larger.
At TEDxBukit Bintang, Raven begins with coffee and follows it towards the places, people and possibilities we may have overlooked.
Amy Blair
Social Enterprise Founder and Inclusive Business Advocate
What keeps a tradition in motion?
Amy Blair is Founder-CEO of Batik Boutique, a B Corp Certified social enterprise taking Malaysian batik global while sustaining artisan livelihoods.
What began as an artisan initiative has grown into an inclusive business creating dignified work for artisans, seamstresses and makers nationwide. Amy’s practice brings contemporary design, responsible enterprise and Malaysian heritage craft into the same conversation.
She has spent years looking beyond the finished cloth, towards the knowledge, experimentation and human relationships behind it.
At TEDxBukit Bintang, Amy considers what happens between inheriting a culture and helping it find its next expression.
Juvita Tatan Wan
Indigenous Arts Producer and Social Enterprise Founder
What happens after a culture is seen?
Juvita Tatan Wan is Kenyah. She grew up between Long San, a small community deep in Sarawak’s upper Baram River, and the city.
After more than a decade working across advertising, music and telecommunications in Kuala Lumpur, she returned to Sarawak. In 2017, Juvita and her father, John Wan Usang, co-founded The Tuyang Initiative, helping Borneo’s indigenous cultural practitioners build sustainable livelihoods through larger projects, longer relationships and meaningful career pathways.
Juvita has spent years watching culture enter campaigns, stages and public conversations.
At TEDxBukit Bintang, she turns our attention towards what the spotlight reveals, and what it can still leave behind.
Mathew Ngau Jau
Kenyah Ngorek Elder and Cultural Music Custodian
The Sape’ enters the room.
Mathew Ngau Jau is a Kenyah Ngorek elder from Long Semiyang, Baram, and among the last community-recognised authorities on the Sape’.
Known to his people as the Keeper of the Kenyah Ngorek Songs and recognised by Malaysia as a Living National Heritage, Mathew has carried the instrument from Sarawak’s longhouses to stages across Europe, the United States and Asia.
For more than 30 years, his deepest work has remained teaching: passing on the instrument, its songs and its stories to those willing to sit, listen and learn.
At TEDxBukit Bintang, Mathew will perform.
Some ideas are spoken. Some are carried through sound.
Karl Fender
Architect
What do we notice when we look past the skyline?
Karl Fender is a co-founder of Fender Katsalidis Architects, the practice behind the designs of Kuala Lumpur’s Merdeka 118 and Melbourne buildings including Eureka Tower and Australia 108.
He has served as National President of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects and continues to contribute to architectural advisory committees, design competitions and government design-review panels.
His career has taken him across towers, workplaces, homes and public spaces. Yet architecture is experienced at more than one scale.
At TEDxBukit Bintang, Karl starts with buildings and leads us towards the movement, memory and everyday life that form around them.
Prof. Gerard Bodeker
Harvard-trained Public Health Academic
What happens when a boundary begins to blur?
Gerard Bodeker is a Harvard-trained public health academic whose work spans integrative medicine, wellness and the relationship between human health and the world around us.
He taught medical sciences at Oxford University for two decades, is Adjunct Professor of Epidemiology at Columbia University and advises business, governments and the United Nations. He is also Founding Chair of the Global Wellness Institute’s Mental Wellness Initiative and Co-Chair of its Microplastics Watch Initiative.
At TEDxBukit Bintang, Gerard brings a public-health perspective to a familiar environmental concern.
He enters a question that science is still working to understand, and that society may need to consider sooner than expected.
Mollie Rogers
Workplace Culture Advocate
What does work feel like from the inside?
Mollie Rogers Jean De Dieu founded Emotional Inclusion®, a non-profit humanising the workforce.
Across more than 20 years in people work, she has listened to accounts of the emotional realities behind leadership pressure, organisational change and workplace expectations. Her practice draws on positive and behavioural psychology, leadership development and organisational change.
Those realities are becoming harder to ignore as work grows faster, more automated and more demanding.
At TEDxBukit Bintang, Mollie looks beyond systems and productivity towards the human experience unfolding inside them.
Karen Abraham
Intellectual Property Litigator + Tech & Data Protection Law Expert
Who speaks when knowledge belongs to a community?
Karen Abraham heads the Intellectual Property Department at Shearn Delamore & Co.
Across more than 30 years of litigation, she has appeared before Malaysia’s apex courts and contributed to the development of the country’s intellectual-property jurisprudence. Her practice also spans technology, media, telecommunications, data protection, competition law and e-commerce.
Her work has brought her close to questions that become more difficult when knowledge does not begin with one author, inventor or owner.
At TEDxBukit Bintang, Karen enters the space where inherited knowledge, community authority, legal systems and emerging technologies begin to meet.
Faisal Fadzil
Wellness Entrepreneur and Product Innovator
How does an inherited practice enter modern life?
Mohamad Faisal Ahmad Fadzil co-founded Tanamera with his siblings, Fauziah and Faridah.
Their work grew from traditional Malay wellness knowledge passed down by their late mother, Hajjah Siti Fatimah, particularly her understanding of local herbs, natural remedies, postnatal care and traditional healing rituals.
Faisal now leads work across product development, formulation, manufacturing, branding, business strategy and international expansion.
At TEDxBukit Bintang, he begins with Malay wellness and a question faced by every living tradition:
As the world around it changes, how does a practice continue to belong?
Dr Sarah Whyte
Emotional Intelligence Researcher and Educator
What do we lose when language falls short?
Dr Sarah Whyte researches the relationship between emotional language and emotional intelligence.
With a doctorate in emotional intelligence, a postgraduate certificate in counselling psychology and a background in teaching, she translates emotional science into practical insights for relationships, workplaces and everyday life.
Her work begins with an experience most of us recognise: something is happening inside us, but the language available feels too small or too general to describe it.
At TEDxBukit Bintang, Sarah begins with that familiar gap and follows it towards the way we understand ourselves and one another.
TED's curation approach
TED's mission is to discover and spread ideas that spark imagination, embrace possibility and catalyze impact. At a time of growing divide, we invite a broad range of speakers to our events to share ideas and to seek deeper understanding. We believe that it's possible to learn something from speakers even when disagreeing with aspects of their work or beliefs, and we are committed to being a place where people with differing viewpoints can come together and participate in meaningful conversations.
Inclusion
Ideas are for everyone. They can't be fenced off by borders, whether of geography, religion, politics or culture. And no single origin, race, gender, identity or class can claim preferential ownership over them. TED is committed to a global mindset. We seek to source ideas from everywhere and to make them widely and freely accessible.
Debate
Our content isn't the final word on anything. Skeptics are welcome, and may play a key role in improving an idea or revealing its flaws. Others may find that conversation after a talk is the best path to clarity or figuring out what to do with it. We strive to provide a neutral, open space for vigorous discussion and debate both online and face to face.
Ready to join us?
Apply now to attend TEDxBukit Bintang and join a special community making a difference for our collective future.
