Keynotes
Five signature keynotes by Gabriella Di Laccio MBE — TED2026 main-stage speaker, Royal College of Music-trained soprano and PhD researcher. Each talk is shaped to its audience and delivered in English, Brazilian Portuguese or Spanish.
The Missing Half
Goal: Open audiences to one of the great cultural blind spots of our era — and what it costs us to leave it unaddressed.
Overview: For four hundred years, women composed music that history forgot to keep. The archive we inherited is not neutral — it is incomplete by design. Gabriella weaves live performance, archival evidence and her own journey from Royal College of Music to TED2026 main stage to ask what changes in our culture, our institutions, and the AI systems being trained on our archives the moment we acknowledge what is missing. This is the keynote that earned her the TED Global Idea Search and a place on the TED main stage in Vancouver, April 2026.
Who is this for? International conferences, cultural summits, plenary openings, broadcaster events, festival opening nights, royal and state occasions.
What AI Learns When We Erase Women From Music
Goal: Show leaders in technology, culture and creative industries how cultural bias becomes algorithmic bias — and what to do about it now.
Overview: Every generative AI system is trained on the cultural archive we built. If half of music history was never recorded, indexed or taught, what is the machine learning? Drawing on five years of Donne Foundation research across 115 countries and more than 5,000 women composers, Gabriella explains how an incomplete archive becomes a flawed dataset, how flawed datasets become biased systems, and why this is the single most important conversation creative industries, educators and technology leaders are not yet having. Delivered at TEDxLondon as part of the global TED Idea Search series.
Who is this for? Technology and AI conferences, creative-industry forums, cultural-policy summits, broadcaster strategy days, university-tech crossover events.
The Art of Activism
Goal: Reframe activism as a craft — and show leaders, artists and changemakers how to build movements that last.
Overview: Activism is too often imagined as protest. Gabriella argues it is, at its best, a discipline — closer to art than agitation. From founding the Donne Foundation in 2018 to delivering a Guinness World Record, from publishing the world’s most-cited orchestral diversity report to becoming an Academy-recognised resource for Oscar® eligibility, she shares the principles that move a cause from headline to system change: build with rigour, lead with beauty, refuse smallness, never plead. A keynote for anyone who wants their work to outlive the moment.
Who is this for? Foundation and philanthropy summits, leadership forums, ESG and DEI flagships, gender-equality events, cultural-policy conferences, social-impact gatherings.
Find Your Voice — And Use It
Goal: Help women and young leaders move from being heard to being unforgettable.
Overview: A voice is not just a sound — it is the instrument through which influence, identity and impact travel. Gabriella, who trained at the Royal College of Music and now speaks on TED’s main stage and at the House of Lords, takes audiences inside the discipline of finding the voice that is yours alone, and the courage to use it where it matters most. Equal parts performance, story and provocation, this keynote leaves women and emerging leaders with both a sense of permission and a framework for action.
Who is this for? International Women’s Day plenaries, women’s leadership summits, university commencements, student leadership programmes, corporate ERG flagship events.
Resilience Has a Sound
Goal: Move audiences through one of the great unspoken truths of high-stakes performance — that resilience is built, not born — using the language of music.
Overview: What does it take to walk back on stage after silence? To rebuild a career across countries, languages and decades? To found an institution from a kitchen table and end up at TED? Gabriella translates twenty-five years of professional performance, four life reinventions and a globally recognised activism platform into a language any leader, athlete, founder or team can use. Resilience, she argues, is not a mindset — it is a practice, with the same architecture as a musical phrase: breath, control, surrender, return.
Who is this for? Corporate leadership conferences, sales and high-performance teams, sports and athletic platforms, healthcare and frontline-leadership events, founder and entrepreneur summits.