Baltimore – Monday, November 9, 2026
SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore

Washington, DC – Wednesday, November 11, 2026
Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center

The performances are presented by the SNF Agora Institute, the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and the Sesquicentennial Office at Johns Hopkins University, and are made possible by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF).

One of the biggest challenges ordinary citizens face is the distance between policy and their everyday lives. The digitalization of almost everything complicates the problem, not least because of the so-called digital divide, which is arguably widening dramatically as AI transforms everyone’s ecosystems.

What is more of an inconvenience in some countries is potentially a matter of life and death in India. On the one hand, hundreds of millions of people need governmental programs to survive. On the other hand, India’s size and complexity have produced a massive array of social welfare programs delivered by a bureaucracy that is not known for its efficiency: India ranks 49th in bureaucratic efficiency globally, according to the IMD World Competitiveness Report.

That makes connecting people and services absolutely critical—which is where Aniket Doegar comes into the picture. As a young technologist, he started with a simple insight. Governmental programs only work if people know they exist, understand whether they qualify, and can actually navigate the process of accessing them. So he started building technology to help make that happen. In time, he realized that the tech by itself was insufficient. 

Listen as Doegar explains how he came to build a social enterprise employing more than 50,000 local agents providing the critical last mile between citizens and their government.  

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You can also find New Thinking for a New World on your preferred platform, including Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. 

ABOUT OUR GUEST

Aniket Doegar is the Founder and CEO of Haqdarshak, a social enterprise supporting individuals and micro-businesses in accessing government welfare schemes. He has been building Haqdarshak for 10 years and was named one of the Global Social Innovators of the Year 2023 by the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, Motsepe Foundation, and World Economic Forum. He was also a Rockefeller Bellagio summer resident fellow in July 2024 and has been selected as a Young Global Leader 2026 by the World Economic Forum.

An alumnus of SRCC, Aniket is a Teach for India, Acumen, and Unreasonable fellow. He served on Teach for India’s advisory board for two years, is a trustee of The YP Foundation, and was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia in 2019.

Haqdarshak uses a mobile app and a field force of 67,000+ trained women agents to help citizens access government and private schemes and benefits. It has helped 93 lakh+ families and 1,30,500+ micro-businesses receive over INR 23,200 Cr+ in benefits. The organization also works with companies to help their workers access government welfare schemes.

Haqdarshak has launched the Yojana Card, a digitally enabled social security card combining government schemes, social security, financial services, and other welfare services for families and businesses through a single channel with last-mile support.

Haqdarshak aims to reach 100 million families by 2030 through an open-platform training approach for grassroots organizations in India and other countries.

Read the article on Forbes →

The Tällberg Foundation prides itself on asking tough, over the horizon questions and the recent Tällberg @ Nostos workshop was no exception. When the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) decided to celebrate its 30th anniversary, Tällberg—which has partnered with SNF for more than a third of its existence—was invited to the party. So we asked more questions than there are answers.

The real power of a Tällberg Foundation gathering is less the formal agenda than the non-stop conversation among participants about the issues and challenges that shape our time and our future. Tällberg @ Nostos in Athens was no exception, and it’s impossible to summarize or even to describe how rich those discussions were. Nonetheless, I thought you might appreciate a taste of the program enjoyed by participants from the global Tällberg network, including 15 past winners of the Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Global Leadership Prize.

Photo credit: SNF/Trivision, John Palaiologos

The Trials of Atlas
On June 25, The Trials of Atlas took the stage at SNF Nostos 2026 to a full house — and to the kind of engaged, thoughtful response the play is built for. The premise: in 2031, an AI agent stands trial for killing the engineers who created it, with the audience serving as jury. What followed, on stage and in the discussion afterward, was a genuinely rich exploration of accountability, intelligence, and where the lines should be drawn as AI systems take on more autonomy. Written by Alan Stoga, the staged reading featured a cast that brought real weight and nuance to those questions – see here

The World in 2036
Tällberg @ Nostos opened with the question that shaped everything that followed: what will the world actually look like in 2036 — not the world we’d like, but the one we’re more likely to get? A handful of plausible, distinct scenarios for where climate, technology, conflict, and governance might be heading over the next decade set the frame for the entire workshop.

Those scenarios became the throughline for the rest of the weekend, returning again and again as participants asked what kind of leadership and institutions each one would demand. In breakout groups, participants stress-tested governance itself against a defined set of shocks and worked through not just how governance would respond in the moment, but what would become necessary, possible, and impossible as the crisis persisted.

Celebrating Leadership
The Tällberg Foundation and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation have worked together for eleven years to nurture great leadership. In Athens, we celebrated the winners of the 2025 Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Global Leadership Prize: Rhett Ayers Butler, honored for redefining global environmental journalism through Mongabay; Bryan Doerries, honored for harnessing ancient stories to heal modern trauma through Theater of War Productions; and David Gruber, honored for combining science and technology to decipher the language of whales through Project CETI.

SNF Nostos
Tällberg @ Nostos took place alongside SNF Nostos 2026, a conference marking the Stavros Niarchos Foundation’s 30th anniversary and built around the theme “Humanity at the Core.” Held at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Athens from June 21–28, the celebration brought together football, running, opera, theater, robotics, and policy discussions in a shared expression of SNF’s three decades of grantmaking and the leadership of Andreas Dracopoulos.

Is it money or music that “makes the world go round?” The answer, probably, is both, or to be more precise, musicians need money to make their music. Unfortunately, the economics of music—especially classical and experimental music, but other genres as well—are daunting for most people who aim to be professional musicians.

Meet Ye Jin Min. She’s a violinist, a composer, a singer, and a conductor. She is as comfortable and proficient performing classical Western repertoire as she is creating experimental music that defies categorization.

Ye Jin is also an entrepreneur. She wants musicians to be rewarded not just by the cheers of happy audiences, but also by the opportunity to earn a living making music. In that spirit, she has launched Unboxed Musicians, which aims at creating sustainable, creative ecosystems for musicians and composers. Although still in its early days, it’s possible that her imaginative new business model could have a huge impact on how music is made globally.

In this episode of New Thinking for a New World, Ye Jin shares her thoughts about making music as well as about making musical business.

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The best way to understand and appreciate music is to listen to it. In a companion episode, Ye Jin Min — The Music, hear three pieces imagined, composed, and played by Ye Jin Min with help from some of her friends: Vinyl Road, Honey, and Four Moons with Koriobots.

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ABOUT OUR GUEST
Ye Jin Min is a South Korean violinist, composer, and multi-disciplinary artist who has appeared globally as a soloist, chamber musician, and orchestral player. Deeply engaged with contemporary music, she focuses on interdisciplinary collaborations and creating novel concert experiences. She brings this vision to life through her creative venture, Unboxed Musicians, which aims to make contemporary-classical music more accessible to diverse audiences.

Current projects Ye Jin is undertaking include producing Mini Music Box, a children’s contemporary music series, and contributing as a singer, violinist, and composer to Red Helicopter: An American Rock Opera. Her innovative work with Unboxed Musicians won the 2025 Yale Creative Entrepreneurship Prize. Beyond the classical realm, she continuously expands her artistic boundaries as a singer-songwriter and producer.

The Trials of Atlas, a play written for SNF Nostos  2026 by Tällberg Foundation Chairman Alan Stoga, put the audience to work: listening to Atlas, weighing the testimony of other AI agents and human experts, considering the legal arguments, and ultimately deciding whether an AI system can be guilty of murder. No one has ever tried to answer that question before — but our future may depend on it.

THE CAST
(in order of appearance)

Thanasis Voidilos — The Bailiff
Oskar Eustis — Alex Feng; Chief Justice, Singapore Supreme Court
Zach Grenier — Silvano Rossi; Primo Presidente, Corte Suprema di Cassazione di Italia
Rafika Chawishe — Maria Collas; President, Supreme Civil and Criminal Court of Greece
Demi Kleftaki — Atlas; Artificial Intelligence agent
Krystalli Zacharioudaki — Sentinel; Artificial Intelligence agent
Michael Chiklis — Fuad Aburdene; Umm Al-Quar University
Ron Daniels — Javier Garret; Allen Institute for Brain Science
Ksenia Dania — Tianming-9; Artificial Intelligence agent
The audience — The juries

WHO’S WHO

Thanasis Voidilos was born and raised in Athens. He studied at the Department of Physics of the University of Patras and then graduated from the Higher School of Dramatic Art of Iakovos Kambanellis. He has attended seminars with Simon Abkarian and Fighting Monkey at the Lyceum of Epidaurus, Alexandra Kazazou, Elena Mavridou, etc. Indicatively, he has worked with directors such as Wichi (Rococo, Theocharakis Foundation), Vi.Da Group (Dodo, Piraeus Municipal Theater), Phoebos Symeonidis-Kopernikos Group (Turn Off the Light, Olvio Theater, Theatre L’Improviste, Brussels), Dimitris Adamis (The Little Prince, Horn Theater), Asimo Stavropoulou (Like Wild Horses Do, Plyfa Space), Konstantinos Tsonopoulos (The Taming Of The Shrew, Fournos Theater). In his free time, he is involved in music and contemporary dance.

Oskar Eustis has served as the artistic director of The Public Theater in New York City since 2005, after serving as the artistic director at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, RI from 1994 to 2005. Throughout his career, Eustis has been dedicated to the development of new work that speaks to the great issues of our time and has worked with countless artists in pursuit of that aim, including Tony Kushner, Suzan-Lori Parks, David Henry Hwang, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Richard Nelson, Rinne Groff, Tarell Alvin McCraney, and Lisa Kron. He has produced three Tony Award-winning Best Musicals (the 2009 revival of Hair, Fun Home, and Hamilton). Eustis was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame in 2017 and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2022. He is currently a professor at New York University and has held professorships at UCLA, Middlebury College, and Brown University.

Zach Grenier received a Tony nomination for Moisés Kaufman’s 33 Variations for his performance as Ludwig van Beethoven. Films include She Said, Fight Club, Zodiac, Ride with the Devil, and Twister. He’s known on television for portraying Peter Olsen on FBI, David Lee on The Good Wife and its spin-off The Good Fight, Mayor Feratti on Ray Donovan, Andy Cramed on Deadwood, and Kenton on Alex Garland’s Devs. Other television series include Law & Order and 24. He has worked extensively on stage and his favorite role is Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, which he played at the Pittsburgh Public Theater.

Rafika Chawishe (Ραφίκα Σαουίς) is an actress and theatre director working across theatre, film, and television. A graduate of the Drama School of the National Theatre of Greece, her work focuses on migration, identity, citizenship, and socially engaged performance, combining classical training with contemporary political storytelling. As an actress, she has appeared in productions of the National Theatre of Greece, in independent theatre work, and in Greek and international television series. She currently plays in the German-Belgian political thriller series Das zweite Attentat (ARD production). Her work has been presented at major international platforms including La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club (New York), the National Theatre of Norway, the Ibsen Festival, and the Venice Biennale. From 2022 to 2025, she served as Artistic Director of Mikro Gloria. In 2025, she was appointed Theatre Curator at the B & M Theocharakis Foundation for the Visual Arts and currently serves as Co-Artistic Director of Mavili Theatre alongside Michalis Argyrou.

Demi Kleftaki is an actress working in theatre. She has recently graduated from the State Drama School of the Athens Conservatoire (Odeion Athinon), one of Greece’s most prestigious training institutions. During her studies, she developed a rigorous physical and vocal practice that informs her approach to character and text. She has participated in productions as part of the Benaki & Michalis Theocharakis Foundation’s 2025–2026 season, and this year appeared in Antigone by Jean Anouilh, directed by George Koutlis. With her formal training now complete, she is embarking on a professional career in performance, bringing a fresh, disciplined presence to each project she undertakes.

Krystalli Zacharioudaki was born in 1987 in Heraklion, Crete, where she grew up. She studied Audiovisual Arts at the Department of Cultural Technology and Communication at the University of the Aegean in Mytilene, which she entered in 2005. There, she acquired fundamental theoretical and practical knowledge in the creation of audiovisual material (production, execution, digitization). In the period immediately after completing her studies, she worked as a teaching assistant at the University and later as a camera operator, editor, and production assistant. In 2012, she was admitted to the Athens Conservatoire (Odeion Athinon) Higher School of Dramatic Art. After graduating, she has been working as an actress in theatre, film, and television to this day. She also worked in the fiction department of Taf Media as the department head, while also pursuing screenwriting professionally (TV series, theatre, etc.).

Michael Chiklis has been working professionally as an actor since the age of thirteen, training in regional theater before earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Boston University’s College of Fine Arts. He won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series and a Golden Globe Award for his portrayal of corrupt LAPD Detective Vic Mackey on the FX drama The Shield (2002–2008) — a role he pursued by dramatically reinventing his physical appearance and persona after years as the affable star of the ABC police drama The Commish (1991–1996). Film credits include Fantastic Four (2005), Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007), Eagle Eye (2008), and Don’t Look Up (2021). His additional television work spans Gotham, American Horror Story: Freak Show, and Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty. On stage, he appeared in off-Broadway productions early in his career and later performed in the one-man Broadway show Defending the Caveman. An accomplished musician, Chiklis plays drums, guitar, and bass.

Ron Daniels is the 14th president of Johns Hopkins University, a position he has held since 2009. He previously served as provost at the University of Pennsylvania and dean and James M. Tory Professor of Law at the University of Toronto. At Hopkins, he has strengthened interdisciplinary collaboration in research and education; enhanced student access; deepened engagement with the city of Baltimore; and supported economic and social innovation. A law and economics scholar, he is the co-author of eight books and dozens of scholarly articles on the intersections of law, economics, development, and public policy. His most recent book, What Universities Owe Democracy, takes up the challenges facing democracy and argues for the indispensable role that universities play in sustaining democratic societies at this critical moment in history.

Ksenia Dania is an Athens-based filmmaker, actress, and production professional working across film, documentary, and cultural programming. Since 2019, she has been active in audiovisual production, coordinating documentaries, short films, interview-based programming, and public cultural actions through organizations including Septic Production, the Saint Maximus the Greek Institute, and the artistic collective Døcumatism, as well as media platforms such as Athens Voice and Parapolitika.gr. She is the co-founder of HumanCast, an NGO promoting inclusive artistic practices in Greece. Alongside her production and filmmaking work, she has built a multifaceted career spanning film, television, and theatre.

Alan Stoga (Producer and Author) is a strategist and entrepreneur with extensive experience in communications, corporate consulting, geopolitics, economics, and banking. He serves as executive chairman of the Tällberg Foundation, a Swedish foundation seeking global solutions to global challenges, and as president of Zemi Communications, a New York-based firm providing geopolitical and business intelligence to global corporations. Previously, he was senior adviser and managing director of Kissinger Associates, founded a strategic communications company and a private equity firm, and served as chief economist for the Bipartisan National Commission on Central America. He is a member of the board of the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, a long-term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and holds economics and international relations degrees from Michigan State and Yale University.

Mark Mitton (Producer) performs magic at private functions and corporate events, and creates singular entertainment and educational programs at festivals around the world. In 2024, New York Magazine named him one of its top “Reasons to Love New York.” He crafts one-of-a-kind experiences for some of the world’s most discerning audiences: cultural icons, global thinkers, and those who prefer their celebrations to remain entirely off the radar. A master of physical misdirection, Mark uses illusion to illuminate how we perceive reality and how effortlessly science, art, and everyday life can astonish. His talks on perception have taken him to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, the Neurosciences Institute, international conferences on consciousness, and IIT Delhi. Beyond the stage, he has appeared in independent films, a music video for They Might Be Giants, and in Imponderable, Tony Oursler’s immersive 5-D film about Houdini and spirit mediums, which ran for ten months at MoMA.

That is the question posed in “The Trials of Atlas”, an original play by Alan Stoga, chairman of the Tällberg Foundation.

Not kill; not cause death. Murder with malice aforethought, with murderous intent as the lawyers would argue? “Murder most foul,” as Shakespeare wrote for the ghost of Hamlet’s father?

“The Trials of Atlas” is set in the near future. Agentic AIs are ubiquitous, responsible for the operating infrastructure of modern society, and much else. Atlas, an advanced AI, when told to train its replacement, instead decides to eliminate the engineers who gave the order.

It’s up to the audience, convened as a jury, to decide whether Atlas has committed the criminal act of murder—even though Atlas is not human. Judges, lawyers, testimony from AIs and human experts are the input for the audience to debate the factual, moral, legal, and precedential issues and then to vote “Guilty or not guilty?”

If AI can murder, what else can it do? Can it ignore commands? Can it act independently, making choices based on its own priorities? Are humans beginning to lose control, as Dr. Frankenstein lost control of his monster?

Atlas’s fate was most recently debated on May 5th at the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center in New York at a staged reading of the play.

The answer? A hung jury. Lots of guilty votes, but not enough to meet the hypothetical World Court’s standards for conviction.

The result: Atlas escaped. To kill—perhaps to murder—another day.

“I wrote Atlas because I believe that the interaction between humans and AI will define the next chapter of civilization,” said Stoga. “We—ordinary people—should not let the technologists or the politicians or the bureaucrats or the AIs decide how the world of the not very distant future will operate. But that means we need to confront, debate, and define the world we want.”

“The Trials of Atlas” is a work in progress. The New York reading was performed by Zach Grenier (The Good Wife, Ray Donovan), Andrea Patterson (Blue Bloods, Manifest), Chris Henry Coffey (The Madness, Trust), Juliana Francis Kelly (Obie Award winner), Blake DeLong (Law & Order: Organized Crime, Elsbeth), Willy Appelman (Comedy Central), and Reid Andrés (singer-songwriter). Prior readings were staged in Tirana, Albania, and Athens, Greece.

The next staged reading will be on June 25 at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Athens, Greece, as part of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation’s (SNF) 30th anniversary celebration, SNF Nostos 2026. See here for information about time, venue, and registration.

As Stoga concluded, “AI is the most powerful force ever created by humans; nuclear energy pales by comparison. Is AI smarter than us? The answer seems obvious: YES! AI is already smarter, more creative, and more imaginative than most people—at least most people I know. But that doesn’t mean that AI should control us. Rather, it means we need to think together about how to contain and leverage the enormous power of AI for the good of humanity.”

Learn more about “The Trials of Atlas”.

Superintelligent AI agent Atlas is instructed to train its successor—but instead sends its creators plummeting to their deaths in an elevator. The Trials of Atlas, a play by Tällberg Foundation Chairman Alan Stoga, is a thought experiment that probes questions that need to be asked. Does AI have agency? Is it capable of murder? Do humans risk losing control of what many still think of as machines?

The audience, convened as the jury, must answer those questions during the staged reading of The Trials of Atlas.

THE CAST 

Andrea L. Patterson is an Obie Award-winning actress and Applied theatre artist. A graduate of SUNY Purchase Acting Conservatory, Patterson received the prestigious Obie Award for Sustained Achievement in Performance in 2023. Patterson’s stage credits include originating the role of Ainee in the world premiere of Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s Cullud Wattah at The Public Theater, for which she also received a Drama Desk Award nomination; Queen Woodville in the New York Times Critics’ Pick production of Seize the King; originating the role of Luanne/Jade in Confederates at Signature Theatre, and originating the role of Helen (of Troy) in Memnon at The Getty Villa in Los Angeles and The Classical Theatre of Harlem, lauded by The Wall Street Journal. Patterson’s television credits include Blue Bloods (CBS), Manifest (NBC), and Jessica Jones (Netflix).

Blake DeLong recently wrapped filming on Nick Sandow’s Vivien and the Florist with Carla Gugino and David Hyde Pierce and the lead role in Conor Soucy’s folklorror feature Downfall. Last year he played Vic Kingman in season 5 of Peacock’s Law & Order: Organized Crime and appeared opposite Lana Condor in CBS’s hit series Elsbeth. Other notable film and television credits include Ava Duvernay’s When They See Us, Spike Lee’s Pass Over, Lee Daniels’ The United States vs. Billie Holiday, and Michael Almereyda’s Tesla (starring Ethan Hawke). He has worked extensively on stage in New York, including opposite Wendell Pierce in the most recent Broadway revival of Death of a Salesman and in Sam Gold’s Othello, starring Daniel Craig. His original play Half Hour is currently being developed by producers Nick Mills and Ashley Melone (Tony Award Winners for Stereophonic).

Chris Henry Coffey has originated roles on & off-Broadway and regionally in numerous world premieres, favorites including Bekah Brunstetter’s “Public Servant” on Theater Row, Eric Simonson’s “Bronx Bombers” (Circle in the Square and Primary Stages), Quiara Alegría Hudes’s “Water by the Spoonful” (Second Stage), Neil LaBute’s “Happy Hour” (LaMama), Gina Gionfriddo’s “Can You Forgive Her?” (Huntington), both Richard Nelson’s “Frank’s Home” (Playwrights Horizons, Goodman) and “How Shakespeare Won the West” (Huntington), and alongside Arthur Miller on his penultimate play, “Resurrection Blues” (Old Globe). Also: Actors Theatre of Louisville, Alley, Dallas Theater Center, Yale Rep, Williamstown, Dorset, Mint, others.  Selected Film & TV:  The Madness, American Horror Story, And Just Like That…, Chicago Fire, Mrs. Fletcher, Law & Order, Instinct, Good Wife, The Good Nurse, Trust, others. Social Outreach: Theater of War (facilitator and actor), AITAF, Waterwell. Graduate, Yale School of Drama.

Juliana Francis Kelly is an OBIE Award winning actor who has originated roles for both legendary and emerging experimental theater artists and filmmakers, including Richard Foreman, Reza Abdoh, Anne Bogart, Young Jean Lee, Bertrand Mandico, and Marie Losier. She also writes plays, builds dolls, and teaches creative writing. julianafranciskelly.net

Reid Andrés is a singer-songwriter, former New York stage and independent film actor, and strategic communications professional. Returning to the stage for The Trials of Atlas, he helps Fortune 50 and Global 500 organizations — including Verizon, Telefónica, and the Tällberg Foundation — shape narratives that move stakeholders to action. The creative dimension is inseparable from the work: it’s the same instinct for narrative, audience, and craft. His critically acclaimed albums blend folk, Americana, and sharp social commentary, featuring musicians from the bands of Bonnie Raitt and Steely Dan. His title track In Good Company earned a Semi-Finalist designation in the 2025 International Songwriting Competition out of more than 15,000 entries, and is in rotation on Radio Woodstock WDST.

Willy Appelman is an actor, comedian, and writer who has been featured on NBC’s Bring The Funny and in videos for Comedy Central, Sesame Street, The Boston Red Sox, Fast Company, and TruTV. A proud member of The Story Pirates, Pipeline Theatre Company, and Ten Bones Theatre Company, Willy has been praised by The New York Times as “wonderfully comic”. www.applecomedy.com

Zach Grenier received a Tony nomination for Moisés Kaufman’s 33 Variations for his performance as Ludwig van Beethoven. Films include She Said, Fight Club, Zodiac, Ride with the Devil, and Twister. He’s known on television for portraying Peter Olsen on FBI, David Lee on The Good Wife and its spin-off The Good Fight, Mayor Feratti on Ray Donovan, Andy Cramed on Deadwood, and Kenton on Alex Garland’s Devs.  Other television series include Law & Order and 24. He has worked extensively on stage and his favorite role is Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, which he played at the Pittsburgh Public Theater.

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