Villa Albertine

The 2022 Night of Ideas by Villa Albertine explored urgent questions around our most critical challenges – from racial violence to the climate crisis to the erosion of democracy – to reimagine more promising paths forward for our communities. 

Participants embarked on an original on the road happening from Villa Albertine headquarters in Manhattan to Brooklyn Public Library, where 60 members of the public enjoyed a private 1:1 discussion with a mystery  Night of Ideas speaker. 

Participants then gathered for a marathon of talks, musical performances, screenings, and lively forums at Brooklyn Public Library, headlined by a performance from Patti Smith. Programming included Goncourt Prize-winning novelist Leïla Slimani, Director of the Lenape Center Joe Baker, Chief AI Scientist at Meta Yann LeCun, political scientist Claire Sagan, and more.   

Some of the speakers at Night of Ideas included:

Geoff Dembicki is an investigative climate reporter based in New York. He is a regular contributor to VICE News and author of the forthcoming book The Petroleum Papers: Inside The Far-Right Conspiracy To Cover Up Climate Change.

Fabiola Hanna's art practice and research joins memory work, digital archives, and software studies. She is currently working on both a multimedia narrative intelligence project on the contested history of Lebanon and a book on historical justice in digital environments. She is Assistant Professor at the School of Media Studies at The New School.

Presented by: Brooklyn Public Library and Villa Albertine.

Co-presenters: Brooklyn Public Library, Czech Center, Romanian Cultural Institute, Consulate General of Estonia in New York, Polish Cultural Institute New York, Ukrainian Institute of America, Delegation of the European Union to the United Nations - New York and FIAF – French Institute Alliance Française