Deborah Henson-Conant’s Keynotes, Talks & Concert Add-Ons
These interactive masterclass-style events can be booked individually or as part of a performance package to connect with communities, donors and a broader concert audience.
INTERACTIVE MASTERCLASS
7 Strings: A Life of Creative Engagement
- Format: 30–90 minutes | Flexible / Scalable
- Who It’s For: Musical and non-musical audiences, corporate teams, university students, anyone who has felt the gap between what they want to express and what they feel permission to express
- Group Size: Scales from private donor salon, to pre-concert opener or full standalone event
- Pairs With: Any of DHC’s performance programs as a natural add-on
- Technical Needs: Basic amplification and lighting suitable to the room size
Basic Description: The Seven Strings is a flexible 30–90 minute keynote concert in which DHC combines live music, storytelling, and improvisation to take audiences inside the creative process — demonstrating the seven principles that helped to structure her unconventional career. Scalable from a pre-concert presentation, to a community or private donor event, it leaves audiences with a working framework of creative engagement that they can apply immediately to their own lives.
7 Strings [More Detailed Description]
An inspirational keynote concert — part TED talk, part live performance — The Seven Strings takes audiences inside the world of creative engagement through music, storytelling, humor, and live improvisation on DHC’s signature electric body harp. Mapping the seven principles of creative engagement to the 7 strings in each octave of the harp, she demonstrates in real time and in music, how a creative impulse transforms into creative expression – and shows how resonance increases when we’re creatively engaged what we’re doing.
Audiences walk away with a working framework they can apply immediately to their own lives, whether in the arts, leadership, education, athletics or daily life — along with a lived experience of Creative Engagement: and the rare state of creative resonance in which you’re creatively engaged with everything you do, and fully embodying your own creative expression – as the principle of connection, not perfection, becomes the measure of everything.
TEDX TALK
Live TEDx Masterclass:
Reinventing Freedom with Electric Harp
Format: 15 minutes to full event | Scalable with Q&A
Who It’s For: General audiences, corporate teams, university students, anyone who has ever wanted to see inside a mind that refuses to accept “impossible”
Group Size: Scales from private donor salon, to pre-concert opener or full standalone event
Pairs With: Any of DHC’s performance programs as an opener or standalone
Technical Needs: Basic amplification and lighting suitable to the room size
Basic Description: What if your biggest limitation became your greatest innovation? In this live performance of her TEDx talk, Deborah Henson-Conant tells the story of how she reinvented the harp — shrunk it down, strapped it on and plugged it in — with the help of a genius French harp-maker, a jazz bass-player, and a very insightful clown. Funny, surprising, and genuinely thrilling to watch, it scales from a 13-minute pre-concert opener to a full event with Q&A.
TEDx [More Detailed Description]
Deborah Henson-Conant walks on stage, harp strapped to her body, and starts talking — and playing — and moving — and singing what she’s saying. This is her TEDx talk — live. As she plays, she tells the story of how she went from a kid who couldn’t read music to a Grammy-nominated composer-performer who literally reinvented her instrument in collaboration with a French harp genius — and in doing so, opened the door for a whole new generation of harpists. It’s funny, personal, surprising, and told entirely “from the harp.” The story moves from her playing an 80-pound concert harp in college to inventing a carbon-fiber, 11-pound wearable electric harp built like a racing bike — and the journey in between is full of wrong turns, unlikely mentors, including a genius French harp-maker, a jazz bass-player, and a very insightful clown. Audiences don’t just hear the story; they watch it happen, as Deborah moves across the stage, plays, sings, and demonstrates every leap in real time.
MASTERCLASS
My Life with Jean Jaques Rousseau
(A Musical Love Story)
- Format: 45-90 min. | Scalable with Q&A
- Who It’s For: Patrons and audiences interested in how music develops and how creative innovation can lead a composer into new territory; presenters looking for flexible programming
- Group Size: Works as self-contained concert, companion to any performance program, or expanded community event
- Pairs With: Any of DHC’s performance programs; can expand to include local harpists or musical guests for a site-specific experience
- Technical Needs: Basic amplification and lighting suitable to the room size, projection capabilities and a concert harp for demonstration
Basic Description: Part concert, part living creative memoir — My Life with Jean-Jacques Rousseau shows, in 45–60 minutes, how a single piece can unlock a lifetime of creative engagement. Audiences experience a simple 16-bar Minuet transform — live, on stage — into jazz, into a percussive tour de force, into a Grammy-nominated concerto, into an entire ecosystem of repertoire, teaching, and community that now opens doors for musicians worldwide. They leave with a rare insight into how constraints become catalysts, and how one creative seed, tended over a lifetime, can grow into a legacy.
Rousseau [More Detailed Description]
Part concert, part living creative memoir — My Life with Jean-Jacques Rousseau takes audiences inside the journey of a single piece of music and the vast repertoire of new compositions it unlocked. Deborah opens with Rousseau’s simple Minuet and then, through performance and storytelling, shows how a small discovery — a hidden structure perfect for improvisation — adapting to jazz rhythms, the discovery of a new percussive playing style, the composition of a Grammy-Nominated concerto, the expansion into both Classical and alternative programming, and the development of an entire ecosystem of repertoire and teaching that now empowers musicians around the world. What makes this presentation unlike any other is that the evolution happens live on stage. Henson-Conant doesn’t simply describe the transformation — the audience sees and hears it, step by step, as the minuet morphs in real time.
Premiering July 2026 at the One Harp World Conference in Toronto, Ontario – Canada.
