Young people who rock

Lionel Bringuier

2008-01-26T12:21:00.000-08:00

Lionel Bringuier and the concept for the famed Walt Disney Concert Hall were born in the same year. Bringuier was born in Nice, France, but a precocious passion for music would inexorably link him to the Concert Hall in Los Angeles, California. At 21, he is the youngest conductor to lead an orchestra on the stage, one of the main venues of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Bringuier beat 150 applicants from around the world to become Assistant Conductor of the LAPhil. He applied when he was the assistant conductor of the Ensemble Orchestral de Paris and a winner of the prestigious Besancon Young Conductors Competition. Bringuier honed much of his career in the "City of Lights" -- starting when he was 5 years old, playing cello for the Countess of Paris.

Before snagging the position, Bringuier had never traveled to the United States, much less the "City of Angels." Now it is his home as he serves his two-year appointment, complete with an office featuring orange leather sofas, Esa-Pekka Salonen as a colleague, and his old friends Mozart and Strauss. Bringuier sums it up best when he says, "Age isn't important, music is."

Update: Because of scheduling difficulties, today's interview did not take place. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Tadashi Nakamura and Yasmin Fedda

2008-01-12T17:04:00.000-08:00

The Short Film Category at Sundance is full of talented filmmakers, and Tadashi Nakamura and Yasmin Fedda, both 27, are two of the young standouts with their powerful social commentaries.

Nakamura is as a fourth-generation Japanese-American and second-generation filmmaker. His introduction to filmmaking happened at the super-ripe age of 9 days old, in a film directed by his dad, award-winning director Robert A. Nakamura. Now he stands on his own with his film "Pilgrimage," a tribute to a small group of Japanese-Americans in the late 1960s who transformed an abandoned World War II internment camp into a symbol of solidarity.

Fedda has traveled around the world to produce documentaries on subjects like the Santeria religion and colonial stipends in Syria. She is a Lebanese-Canadian filmmaker currently living in Edinburgh, Scotland, which is the scene of her latest film, "Breadmakers," about a community of workers with learning disabilities who make organic bread for local shops and cafes.

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Marianna Palka

2008-01-12T17:03:00.000-08:00

The U.S. Drama category is one of the most prestigious at Sundance. At 26, Marianna Palka is the youngest filmmaker with "Good Dick," a modern-day fairy tale of a boy who fails in love with a reclusive girl. Palka directed and wrote "Good Dick," and she stars in the film alongside her longtime boyfriend, Jason Ritter.

Palka got to Sundance by way of Scotland. She grew up without a television, but that didn't stifle her love for entertainment. She started acting with The Atlantic Theatre Company and made films as a teenager.

Palka already has been compared to the likes of Woody Allen, using her talents in front of and behind the camera.

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Lauren Melodia

2008-01-07T13:11:00.000-08:00

Have you seen an eggplant before? What about an acorn squash? I have, and you may have, too. But Lauren Melodia has found a lot of people who haven't.

In an effort to help her community eat healthier and fresher foods, she started a Community Supported Agriculture project. Every week, Melodia gives Bedford-Stuyvesant residents the opportunity to buy food they can't get anywhere else in their Brooklyn, New York, neighborhood: fresh produce. She encourages her neighbors to stop eating food out of a box that has ingredients they can't pronounce.

CSAs are popping up countrywide because they're a mutually beneficial partnership between a local farm and a community. The residents provide a stable financial base for the farm. In turn, the farm provides affordable produce for the people -- food they might have never seen before, but can certainly pronounce.

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Teen AIDS Ambassadors

2008-01-01T05:54:00.000-08:00

Santa Monica, California, is far from Tanzania. But a group of high schoolers there makes the distance seem closer. The Crossroads Teen AIDS Ambassadors are the youngest certified educator-activists in the country working toward the eradication of the disease.

The California students bring their mountainous mission to Africa. They travel to Tanzania and other countries to help tell their young counterparts about the history of the pandemic, the virology of HIV, and the importance of safe sex. Kids from Tanzania have come to California to go through the program to experience and see inspiration of a life minus the disease.

The hours are long, the information is daunting, and the trek is substantial. But from the AIDS Ambassadors' perspectives, even their small hands can help start move the mountain.

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Isha Jain

2007-12-22T13:32:00.000-08:00

Isha Jain thinks math and science are cool.

In the fifth grade, she started a math camp. By sixth grade, Jain was breezing through college-level work and trigonometry classes. When she was in the eighth grade, she aced advanced calculus.

Her taste for science started at 9 when she created a paradigm to explain the molecular structure of candy. It sounds sweet, but also sophisticated -- teachers in the U.S. and abroad have used her methods in the classroom. Before she was old enough to buy sweets at a PG-13 movie, her candy-making findings were featured at major scientific summits.

Recently, 16-year-old Isha used both skill sets to identify what causes growth spurts. Not only did she think her findings were cool, but so did the journal "Developmental Dynamics," which published her work. The Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology went beyond just the thinking: It gave her a cool $100,000 scholarship.

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Rissi Palmer

2007-12-14T11:46:00.001-08:00

She sounds like a country singer. She's got the soul of a country singer and the moves to match. But some say Rissi Palmer doesn't look a country singer.

To that, the 26-year-old Palmer responds, "I'm what you might call real corn-fed, I'm a country girl, born and bred." Those are lyrics from her hit single, "Country Girl." The song is the first by an African-American woman to hit the Billboard Hot Country chart in 20 years.

Palmer's success is a big "touche" to the critics but it's an even bigger inner victory for herself. She was offered a pop record deal with top producers who worked with the likes of Janet Jackson. But Palmer held out, while struggling with odd jobs, for her true passion -- country music.

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Cell Phones for Soldiers

2007-12-10T09:07:00.000-08:00

"Hey mom ... I love you and miss you, but I'm pretty busy ... so gotta go ... Bye." I talk to my mom several times a day, and probably like a lot of people, I take it for granted. That's a feeling that only gets stronger when you consider soldiers who are in a war zone this holiday season and how expensive calling loved ones overseas can be.

When Brittany and Robbie Bergquist of Norwell, Massachusetts, heard of a soldier having to pay almost $8,000 for a phone bill to call his family from Iraq, they wanted to do something. With $21, the brother and sister duo, then 12 and 13, respectively, started Cell Phones for Soldiers. The organization turns old cell phones into minutes of prepaid calling cards for U.S. troops stationed overseas.

People donate their old phones to the teens. They came up with the idea to sell them to a recycler for $5 and use the money to buy calling cards. Since they started three years ago, the pair has raised more than $1 million in donations and sent 400,000 minutes to troops. They hope to increase that amount nearly tenfold in the next five years so that more soldiers can call and say, "Hey, Mom."

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Cecelia Ahern

2007-12-03T12:53:00.000-08:00

For a moment, she considered writing under a pseudonym. But 26-year-old Cecelia Ahern is proud of the name she has as the daughter of Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern. In fact, she's used it to successfully author four fiction novels.

At 21, she received $1 million to write her first novel, "P.S. I Love You." It was a worldwide best-seller and is being made into a movie staring Hilary Swank. She is now writing her fifth novel and is serving as co-producer for the TV series she co-created, "Samantha Who?"

Ahern would inevitably be in the political spotlight because of her family, but, thanks to her personal successes, she has created her own spotlight in the film and literary worlds.

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Alexandra Nechita

2007-11-26T09:09:00.000-08:00

You might know her as "The Petite Picasso." But Alexandra Nechita's artistic accomplishments are anything but small, and her style is all her own.

Nechita's family escaped communist Romania for the U.S. when she was 2 years old. At 7, Alexandra was painting with oils and acrylics, and her first exhibit was a solo show at a public library in Los Angeles, California, when she was just 8 years old. Now 22, she attracts crowds worldwide for her exhibitions and brings in thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of dollars for her paintings.

Recently selected by the World Federation of United Nations Associations to lead a Global Arts Initiative, Nechita is expanding her reach to more than 100 countries. With very little formal training, she has more than achieved the financial security her family sought 20 years ago. She knew that her career had passed the point of child prodigy when people looked at her art and said, "That's a Nechita."

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Dave Lieberman

2007-11-19T13:49:00.000-08:00

Most guys try and whip something together in their first kitchen in college when they move off campus. Usually their cuisine consists of ingredients you can't pronounce that come straight out of a box, and the end product doesn't really impress. Not so for Dave Lieberman.

While he was still in college, Lieberman started a Connecticut public access cooking show -- "Campus Cuisine." He opened his own campus catering service. His shtick: good food that won't break the bank.

Now, two cookbooks in and the youngest host ever on the Food Network, Dave is helping college guys actually whip up something eatable in that first kitchen. Something that's easy and fancy-sounding at the same time: celery bleu cheese salad, chicken in BBQ sauce, and poached salmon.

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Matthew and Emily Leinwand

2007-11-12T09:11:00.000-08:00

Doing hospital rounds with dad could have been boring. But for Matthew and Emily Leinwand, the experience was inspirational. They wanted to cheer up the kids at the hospital with something simple: crayons.

From that idea and an empty box on their front porch in 2001, Matthew and Emily started Crayons4Kids. Since then, they have collected more than 100,000 new crayons and 7,000 coloring books as well as nearly 1,000 baby rattles and 2,500 new toys and games.

Now, Matthew, 11, and Emily, 12, want to deliver gifts beyond their local pediatric hospital. They've seen the smiles and felt the hugs. These siblings are hoping to deliver that happiness to more hospital beds across America.

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Melinda Doolittle

2007-11-03T12:53:00.000-07:00

She auditioned for "American Idol" with the Stevie Wonder song "For Once in My Life." We know what happened next. Melinda Doolittle finished as the third place finalist of the sixth season of the show.

But what "Idol" fans might not know is that Melinda Doolittle isn't content with limiting herself to entertainment. During her rapid rise to stardom she threw her support behind a cause that wasn't so "celebre" -- malaria. With Malaria No More, Doolittle traveled with first lady Laura Bush to Zambia and other countries in the "malaria belt" of Africa to raise awareness of the disease.

She believes that malaria can be eradicated -- with medicine to treat the disease and with insecticides and bed nets to prevent it in the first place. Doolittle's goal is to help eliminate malaria once and for all in her lifetime.

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Jared Cohen

2007-10-29T09:00:00.000-07:00

Young men watching popular American TV shows on satellite dishes. Young women wearing garish makeup. Teenagers sending secret text messages and arranging illicit trysts. These are perhaps scenarios you'd expect from a major U.S. city, not the images we normally see from the Middle East.

These are some of the things Jared Cohen found when he set out to get the real story from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran. This young foreign policy force is responsible for public diplomacy, Muslim world outreach and North Africa at the U.S. State Department's Office of Policy Planning and, at 25 years old, has the experience to rival his veteran counterparts. Defying government orders, Cohen toured hostile Islamic regions to talk face-to-face with terrorists in an effort to debunk stereotypes and reveal a shocking subculture in his latest book, "Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East."

As a Jewish American, Cohen has guts. He went to Lebanon to interview Hezbollah members at, of all places, a McDonald's. In Iran, he found underground parties, where bootleg liquor, Western music and the Internet are all easy to access. His risky itinerary aims to show us how and why the under-30 generation in the Islamic world is the best hope for the West.

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The organizers of "I Am Worth the Wait"

2007-10-22T16:31:00.000-07:00

We hear about sex all the time -- sex scandals, sex tapes, sexual marketing. The young organizers of I Am Worth the Wait don't want to hear about it anymore. And they certainly don't want to hear how cool it is.

This group is trying to make its own definition of cool: declaring abstinence until marriage, but not living in a convent in the meantime. Rather, the organization puts together events and outreach programs in the Northeast that are full of young people, from event hosts to the models of their clothing line to entertainment.

The goal of the group is to bring together teens and 20-somethings of all races, religions and backgrounds to talk about something other than sex.

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Jen MacNeil

2007-10-15T08:12:00.000-07:00

Approaching 30 can cause angst for some twentysomethings. But for Jen MacNeil, it was a reason to celebrate her life and try some pretty cool things. MacNeil decided to give her 20s a big sendoff by doing one new thing every day from her 29th birthday until the day she turns 30.

The things she says she has tried range from giving someone a haircut and learning to fold fancy napkins to castrating a calf (which she says isn't as gory as it sounds) and serenading an overworked customer service representative. Some of her favorite experiences include adopting an endangered species (a blue-footed booby), culturing organic honey by using a chainsaw and attending an Al-Anon meeting. Of course, being featured on CNN makes the list, too.

MacNeil documents all of her adventures and misadventures on her blog: In the New. She gets hundreds of readers from all over the world, inspiring people to step outside their comfort zones. As she says on her blog, "Life is short, let's make it interesting."

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Taylor Krauss

2007-10-09T12:22:00.000-07:00

Speaking for those who have no voice. It's a provocative idea that Taylor Krauss, founder of Voices of Rwanda, wants to tap into. According to him, "Recording individual testimonies is a moral imperative."

Krauss is the 27-year-old force behind Voices of Rwanda, which is dedicated to recording and preserving the oral history of Rwandans to inform the world about the genocide and to inspire a sense of citizen responsibility to prevent human-rights atrocities. Filming takes place in the United States and Rwanda. Some fiercely emotional interviews, Krauss says, last longer than eight hours.

The goal of Voices of Rwanda is to turn the video archives into an educational resource for journalists, historians, academics, psychologists, artists and activists. The testimonies will be used in curriculums at high schools across the United States and will also be available to museums, schools and other learning institutions around the world. That way, many Rwandan men, women and children will be given not only a voice in history but also an audience to hear it.

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Arabella Uhry

2007-10-01T17:28:00.000-07:00

The sword stretches longer than her height. But that doesn't stop 11-year-old Arabella Uhry from going after fencing dreams. To her, it doesn't matter how young or big you are. "Fencing is like my favorite subject, math: It's all about strategy."

Arabella doesn't listen to those who say, "That's for boys." She made the boys' soccer team at her school in New York City. She boxes. And, even though she admits she's a "tiny person," she trains and holds her own with the "big guys."

This tiny fencing champ started with the sport in the first grade. Arabella has competed and placed in national and regional competitions like the Empire State Games. Now her careful strategy is focused on getting to the mat at the Olympics 2012 or 2016.

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Lindsay Avner

2007-09-24T12:51:00.000-07:00

Albert Camus said, "There are some people who prefer to look their destiny straight in the eye." Lindsay Avner is, without a doubt, one of those people. At a healthy 23, she volunteered to get a double mastectomy because virtually every woman in her life, her mother, grandmother, great grandmother, aunts and cousins, suffered from or died of breast cancer.

Avner took control of her own destiny after a blood test revealed she had a genetic predisposition to the disease. She didn't want to live in fear. She wanted to meet her future husband and say, "we got this out of the way so our family won't go through what I did growing up."

With her new nonprofit organization, Avner is helping raise money and awareness for the disease she knows she won't suffer from but other women will. The mantra is "Be Brilliant. Be Bold. Be Bright Pink." They are things Avner has mastered and with this community, she tries to empower other women to also look their own destiny and the disease straight in the eye.

Update: Thank you all for such an amazing response to this post! Comments are no longer being accepted. Be sure to check out the CNN.com Live Video interview

Ben Goldhirsh

2007-09-17T15:38:00.000-07:00

Whoever said, "what's in a name?" didn't meet Ben Goldhirsh. I guess we'll never know much about those who spew what's now a cliché, but Goldhirsh's name is good to know.

So is the name of Goldhirsh's magazine, appropriately titled GOOD. The magazine is just that -- stories about culturally-conscious young people and their take on energy, politics and business. The subscription fees all go one of 12 approved charities such as UNICEF.

And, there's a lot to the name of his film company. Reason Pictures makes films with, you guessed it, a reason -- socially relevant stories sans the sex, gore and drugs that often hide a deeper message.

Endowed with a ginormous inheritance from his father, Bernie Goldhirsh, who started and sold Inc. magazine, the 26-year-old Goldhirsh is making his own name, while upholding the good that was already synonymous with the one he had.

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Samantha Larson

2007-09-11T07:38:00.001-07:00

She's on top of the world. Samantha Larson has climbed all of the Seven Summits, the highest mountain on each of the continents. Most recently, the 18-year-old tackled Mount Everest, making her possibly the youngest person to climb all seven of the world's highest points, including Europe's Mount Elbrus, North America's Mount McKinley and Australia's Mount Kosciuszko.

Larson started her climbing career with a 19,000-foot hike up Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. At 12, it seemed daunting to her, but not as treacherous as the summits to come. At 13, Larson climbed Mount Aconcagua in Argentina with her dad, as she always does. A feat came even before reaching the top -- 14 is the minimum age for the climb, so she needed special permission.

Larson worked toward the 75-day, $50,000 quest to the top of Everest for six years. Now, she is going to conquer the academic world. Larson deferred her admission to Stanford University for a year to train for the climb, but we don't think they minded.

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Clayton Lillard

2007-09-03T12:31:00.000-07:00

When Clayton Lillard was in the fifth grade, he saw a pair of bikes on top of a trash heap. Lillard had a bike, but he knew there were other kids in his San Antonio, Texas, community who didn't. So, instead of leaving them there, he fixed them up with the help of other neighborhood kids.

That year, Lillard teamed up with the local church's prison fellowship representative and radio station to repair 100 bikes and give them to kids whose parents were incarcerated at Christmas. The movement peddled so fast that it needed a name: Clayton's Backyard Crew. Over the last eight years, the crew has given out more than 900 bikes.

Lillard, now 18, has seen his impact with the community he established with the friends who help him work on the bikes and families who received them. "A mom with eight kids couldn't stop crying because she couldn't afford presents, much less a bike, and the kids were laughing and shouting with joy," Lillard says. That joy keeps Lillard going every year as the captain of his crew.

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Allen Vartazarian

2007-08-27T12:12:00.000-07:00

"Fame! I want to live forever!" The song "Fame" from the musical of the same name tapped into two things a lot of people want. And 24-year-old Allen Vartazarian recognized that sometimes the quest of the former is stronger than the latter.

Vartazarian founded
Taltopia.com (formerly Famesource.com), a social networking portal that connects aspiring talent with fans and industry professionals to help them acquire the fame they so desire in areas such as music, acting and comedy. It's a "talent portal" that lets wannabes upload a free profile and the stuff that's going to make them a star. Then the Digg-like ranking system lets Taltopia users determine if it's "fame"-worthy or just a "shame."

Recognizing that not everyone can afford plane tickets to Hollywood or make it in front of Simon Cowell, Vartazarian and his partner want to bring those resources to them. "The goal is to give everyone the same shot at fame, no matter where they live or how much money they have," he says. Vartazarian just provides the source, actually getting "famed" by the discerning Taltopia community could be just as tough as trying to live forever.

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Summer Rayne Oakes

2007-08-22T15:29:00.001-07:00

Click. She wears a windmill pin but little else. Click. She poses in a forest in a bright fair-trade gown. Click. She smiles covered in mud next to the caption, "we should worship the ground we walk on."

With every click of a camera's shutter, Summer Rayne Oakes sends a message about environmental issues. Using fashion as her catalyst, this 23-year-old "Eco-Model" is all about getting a larger audience to care about sustainability, climate change and going green. Oakes lends her face to mission-based causes, with the idea that modeling can be an excellent way to communicate important issues if approached with thought and values.

Oakes graduated from Cornell with degrees in Natural Resources and Entomology. She's now translating her brains and beauty into a book series, "Hip Girl's Guide to Green Living," a fashion newsletter, S4, and her own think tank called SRO. With every cause-driven venture, she's getting her message to, well, click with other young people.

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Elizabeth Torres

2007-08-15T12:15:00.000-07:00

"We won't stumble. We've come to save the world." It sounds a little different, but it means the same thing in Spanish: "Hemos venido a salvar el mundo."

That's a line from Elizabeth Torres' poem "Heroes," in her new bilingual book, "Because the Flame is Alive." The Colombian-born poet started writing at age 5. Her inspiration came from her native country where she saw children trading pens for guns.

Now, this 19-year-old poet and motivational speaker travels across the United States and Latin America with the message in her poem: Be a leader today, not tomorrow. And whether it's in English or in Spanish, Torres' idea that young people can succeed translates no matter what language they speak.

Check out some of Torres' poems here.

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