Courtesy Photo The Presque Isle County Library is hosting its first TEDx event on Friday at the Rogers City Theater, kicking off the first program of its kind in northeastern Michigan.

CORRECTION: This story has been updated to reflect that the TEDx event at the Rogers City Theater runs from 7:30 to 10 p.m. Friday. The end time was incorrect in the original version of this story.

ROGERS CITY — The Presque Isle District Library will host its first TEDx event on Friday at the Rogers City Theater, kicking off the first program of its kind in Northeast Michigan.

TED is a nonprofit organization first started as a conference in California more than three decades ago. It has expanded exponentially since then and now, as one of its many initiatives, hosts two yearly conferences at which innovative thinkers from around the world are invited to speak for 18 minutes or less.

People such as Jane Goodall, Bill Gates and Richard Branson have given some of the “TED talks,” and there are new talks posted each day on TED.com.

The TED tagline is “Ideas Worth Spreading,” and the nonprofit has started TEDx to support people and groups that would like to host their own TED-style events in localized settings.

Anne Belanger, program director for the library, saw it as a major opportunity and spearheaded the initiative.

“It is a great opportunity,” Bellanger said. “This has never been done in northeastern Michigan.”

Applying for the license, finding speakers, and organizing the details has taken about half a year for the whole event to come to fruition. It will take place from 7:30 to 10 p.m. Friday at the Rogers City Theater, 257 N. 3rd St., Rogers City. The event will be professionally filmed and eventually shared online through TEDx. Tickets are $10 a person and can be purchased online at rogerscitytheater.com

The two speakers for the live event will be the nationally acclaimed artist John Dempsey and John O’Shea, the curator of Great Lakes archaeology at the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology.

Dempsey’s is a Presque Isle County resident, and his work has been included in a national traveling exhibit put on by the Norman Rockwell Museum called “Re-Imagining the Four Freedoms.” His work was one of 37 selected out of 1,000 submissions, and its part of the tour for “Enduring Ideals: Rockwell, Roosevelt, and the Four Freedoms.” His work is titled “Sunday Night/Monday Morning,” and it went on display in New York City and May and will go on a national tour through 2020. Dempsey will discuss what the four freedoms mean to him and how it ties into his work.

O’Shea focuses on prehistoric cultures and 19th Century shipwrecks within the Great Lakes. During his talk, he will focus on his work with new underwater topographical maps of Lake Huron that have shown an underwater ridge spanning 112 miles from northeastern Michigan to southern Ontario. O’Shea believes the ridge was a land bridge called the Alpena-Amberley Ridge during the last Ice Age about 9,900 years ago. For more than a decade, O’Shea and his team have been uncovering archaeological sites throughout the ridge, and they will soon explore a 500-foot cliff across which caribou and hunters once roamed before it was covered by Lake Huron about 8,000 years ago. He will discuss the significance of these findings.

Belanger said she is thrilled to be able to share this with the community. She said it is locally relevant but also pertains to global issues in the realms of human interest, perspective, science, and history.

“It is not just related to Michigan and this region,” Belanger said, “It will go global and that is so important.”

Kaitlin Ryan can be reached at kryan@thealpenanews.com or at 358-5693.

If you go

∫ WHAT: TEDx Talk

∫ WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Friday

∫ WHERE: Rogers City Theater, 257 N. 3rd St., Rogers City

∫ COST: $10

∫ INFO: Speakers include nationally acclaimed artist John Dempsey and John O’Shea, curator of Great Lakes archaeology. Visit rogerscitytheater.com for more information and to buy tickets.