The Story Collider returns to the Atlanta Science Festival for an evening of true, personal stories about the science of renewal—a fresh breath, a reimagined city, a new understanding of oneself. Join hosts Kellie Vinal and Emma Yarbrough for an outdoor show at Waller’s Coffee Shop. Doors open at 7 PM, show at 7:30 PM.
Stories by:
Michael Czajkowski is an origami physicist, fashion redesigner, experimental science communicator and amateur bicycle pilot. Their research concerns materials that have been punctured, folded and otherwise damaged in strategic way so they will move in dramatic unusual and controllable ways. This research feeds into their greater goals, to connect tangible science with uncommon and underserved audiences. This is the focus of their work with Science for Georgia as Director of advocacy. In their spare time, they like to maintain their social network: mikemingle.com
Adam Forrester is a filmmaker and artist based in Atlanta, Georgia. His film work has been distributed via PBS. He was awarded an Idea Capital grant for his multimedia art project, My Wicked City, which was also selected to be part of the Atlanta Biennial in 2021. From time to time, he reminisces about the moment when jelly shoes and reebok pumps were popular.
Floyd Hall is a media strategist, engineer, cultural producer, writer, and documentarian from Atlanta, Georgia. As an artist and curator his work often relates to the intersection of culture, media, and technology as platforms to construct narratives of place. He is a 2020 Idea Capital artist grant recipient. He has taught at Emory University, is a Hambidge Creative Residency Fellow and has presented as a guest lecturer at Savannah College of Art and Design, Spelman College, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art and the Hudgens Center for Art and Learning; he is a media contributor to ArtsATL, Atlanta Magazine, ART PAPERS, and Americans for the Arts. In 2022 he co-curated the Science Gallery Atlanta exhibition, HOOKED. In 2021 he co-curated the MODA exhibition, The Future Happened: Designing the Future of Music. He holds a BS in Mathematics from Morehouse College, a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Tech, and an MBA from Columbia University.
Ziah McKinney is a Full Spectrum Doula, Ehlers Danlos Patient Advocate, Bellydancer, mother and is a Disabled Queer person with Ehlers Danlos Syndrome. After her awful experiences within the medical industrial complex, both as a disabled person and as a birthing person, she went from being a globe-trotting professional bellydancer to doing advocacy work. She also channels her dance training into combining her birth doula and childbirth educator training into teaching Birth Dance classes, because we all know that to get anything out of a tight space we jiggle it. She spends her free time tending her small food forest and trying to convince her family that they need more farm animals on their one acre Atlanta suburban croft…and she got to doula a goat’s birth for the first time this Fall, and like any birth it just meant not letting anyone disturb them so they could give birth in peace.
Akissi Y. Stokes-Nelson is CEO & Cofounder of WunderGrubs, Inc., a social enterprise producing edible insects as a healthy and sustainable protein. She grew up in a small Southwest Georgia town on the farm of her grandfather, a sharecropper who had amassed over 100 acres of land. He introduced her to entrepreneurship and the power of soil. After 25+ years of a successful career in Finance and IT, she is focused on WunderGrubs becoming a world-class insect supplier.