Dacher Keltner’s research focuses on the biological and evolutionary origins of compassion, awe, love and beauty; and power, social class and inequality. A professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of the Berkeley Social Interaction Lab, he is a leading scholar in the study of emotion and the author of Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life. It is this book that will frame his Chautauqua Lecture Series debut as he opens a week dedicated to “Wonder and Awe — A Week Celebrating Chautauqua’s Sesquicentennial.”

Keltner serves as the faculty director of the Berkeley Greater Good Science Center and in 2020, along with Michael Pollan and others, co-founded the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics. In addition, Keltner is chief scientific advisor at Hume AI, host of the podcast “The Science of Happiness,” has collaborated on projects at Facebook and Google, and served as a scientific consultant for Pixar’s film “Inside Out.”

Keltner is also the author of The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence; Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life; and The Compassionate Instinct: The Science of Human Goodness. He is also co-editor of The Gratitude Project: How the Science of Thankfulness Can Rewire Our Brains for Resilience, Optimism, and the Greater Good.

A member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Keltner earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his doctorate from Stanford University.

The movie critic for The Washington Post, Ann Hornaday returns to Chautauqua to close a week of sesquicentennial festivities with a celebration of film, the movies, and moviegoing as sources of “Wonder and Awe” — how skilled filmmakers use a combination of cinematography, scripting, acting and scoring, and the scale of the screen itself, to elicit these feelings from viewers young and old alike.

After working at Ms. Magazine as a researcher and editorial assistant, she became a freelance writer in New York City, where she eventually began to write about movies for The New York Times’ Arts & Leisure section and other publications. In 1995 she became the movie critic at the Austin American-Statesman in Austin, Texas, where she stayed for two years before moving to Baltimore to be the movie critic at The Baltimore Sun. She left the Sun in 2000 and began working at The Washington Post in 2002. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 2008 and is the author of Talking Pictures: How to Watch Movies.

Hornaday grew up in Des Moines, Iowa, and graduated cum laude with a degree in government from Smith College. She is a member of the National Society of Film Critics and the Broadcast Film Critics Association.