“Children’s voices should be included in this dialogue about our future and our environment because they’re the ones who are going to inherit it.”

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2020 Summit speaker Joan Jonas is a world-renowned artist whose work encompasses a wide range of media including video, performance, installation, sound, text, and sculpture. Joan’s experiments and productions in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s continue to be crucial to the development of many contemporary art genres, from performance and video to conceptual art and theatre.

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Her multimedia installation mixes together her inspirations from different cultures and traditions. In her work, she draws from diverse sources–from fairy tales to essays, from myths to local folklore–which she uses to address contemporary issues. She uses masks, mirrors and video screens to disrupt the conventions of theatrical storytelling and to create a complex layering of powerful images. Both poetic and political, Joan's work conveys her lifelong interest in movement, music, female identity, the environment, as well as natural and urban landscapes.