Prime Minister Tony Blair Headlines 2011-12 Bryan Series
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair will headline Guilford College’s 2011-12 Bryan Series, which will include five programs.
Blair, who speaks Oct. 4, will open a series that includes talks by choreographer Twyla Tharp Oct. 27, CNN senior medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta Nov. 29, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns March 27 and journalist Fareed Zakaria April 10. Blair will speak in the Greensboro Coliseum arena and the other programs will be in War Memorial Auditorium.
Blair served as Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland from May 1997 to June 2007. He was leader of Britain’s Labour Party (1994 to 2007) and a Member of Parliament (1983 to 2007). Currently he serves as the Quartet Representative to the Middle East on behalf of the United States, United Nations, Russia and the European Union.
Tharp has choreographed more than 135 dances and five Hollywood movies, and directed and choreographed four Broadway shows (including the Tony Award-winning dance musical “Movin’ Out”). She is the recipient of two Emmy Awards, the National Medal of the Arts, the Jerome Robbins Prize and the Kennedy Center Honors, as well as 19 honorary doctorates.
Gupta is chief of neurosurgery at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, Ga., and works at the Department of Neurosurgery at Emory University School of Medicine. With CNN, he has covered some of the era’s biggest stories: the attacks of 9/11, the 2004 tsunami and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. He has contributed to CNN’s Peabody Award-winning coverage of Hurricane Katrina, and, during the war in Iraq, reported as an embedded correspondent with the U.S. Navy’s medical unit.
Burns’s documentaries have won seven Emmy Awards and been nominated for two Academy Awards. His films include the award-winning “The Civil War” and “Baseball,” the most-watched series in public television history, along with “Jazz,” The War,” “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” and “Brooklyn Bridge.”. His latest documentary, “Prohibition,” debuts later this year.
Zakaria is a leading authority on international affairs, host of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS, TIME’s editor-at-large and a regular columnist for The Washington Post. His columns and cover stories — on subjects ranging from globalization and emerging markets to the Middle East and America’s role in the world — reach millions of readers weekly. He is the author of the international best-seller The Post-American World, which was revised and updated in 2011.
New subscriptions for the series will be on sale May 2.
