Echoes

Jo Confino has been a journalist for more than 35 years and is currently executive editor, Impact & Innovation and Editorial Director of What’s Working, at the Huffington Post. He develops long-term editorial projects that are based on social, environmental and economic justice and is a member of the senior leadership team. Previously he was an executive editor of the Guardian and chairman and editorial director of the Guardian Sustainable Business website. During his 23 years at the Guardian, he set up and managed a unique multi-stakeholder development project in the Ugandan village of Katine, and helped create the Guardian’s environment and global development website. He has completed a Masters degree in Responsibility and Business Practice at the University of Bath and is also a qualified executive coach and a trained facilitator. Jo chairs and facilitates major conferences around the world as well as more intimate workshops and events. Jo is an associate of Leaders’ Quest, a social enterprise that works with leaders to create a more equitable and sustainable world, and a facilitator at the Singularity University. He is an advisory board member of Parallax Press, a nonprofit publisher, founded and inspired by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, that publishes books on mindfulness in daily life and is a trustee of Theatre for a Change, whose purpose is the empowerment of women and girls, particularly in their sexual and reproductive health.

Laurel Marx returned to making art after a rewarding career in graphic design. This has included interpretive signage projects for the NYC Parks Department in collaboration with landscape architect Nancy Owens Studio. Together, they have won design awards from the ASLA, and she has received an award for Design Excellence for Exhibit Design from the Greater Hudson Heritage Network for the Visitor Center of the Old Croton Aqueduct. Her identity had always been as an artist, making collages on paper from fragments of newsprint typography and found images. Marx struggled to conceal the glued edges with pigment and pastel. Wild marks covered the surface of the drawing. She returned to art making a few years ago, she realized she could utilize the technical skills she now possessed and create collages in the computer. This would be a seamless way to integrate the problematic edges. She had anticipated the change in her inner world and what now captivates her. Instead of scrap images and mark making, the current work could only be expressed using her own photography and condensing the original visual material. This iteration is a direct synthesis of years of thinking about design, the sensibility an ingredient in the way she shapes the content of the work.

Paz Perlman is a visual artist who is currently living in New York and exhibits internationally. She previously lived in the UK where she completed her degree in fine arts at Central St Martins, University of Arts, London. Paz grew up in Israel and left at the age of 19 to spend a year at an Ashram in India. On her return, she completed a degree in dance before moving to Los Angeles, to train in Tai Chi. She then moved to Amsterdam where she lived for 15 years as an artist and instructor in Tai Chi, Chi Kung and Tao Yin Chinese yoga. Alongside her art, Paz has studied and practiced Buddhism for the past 25 years and is now a member of the Order of Interbeing in the tradition of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh.