Sigourney Weaver + David Amaral

Actress Sigourney Weaver played a woman with severe autism in Snow Cake and now sees similar behavior in neurotypical people. Neuropsychologist David Amaral will help her explore the grey areas of where the autism spectrum begins and ends.

About the Speakers

Sigourney Weaver is an award-winning actor who has created a host of memorable characters, both dramatic and comic, on stage and in film. Her fifty films include the Alien movies, Ghostbusters, Gorillas in the Mist, Working Girl, The Ice Storm, Galaxy Quest, Prayers for Bobby, Avatar, and many others. A Monster Calls with Felicity Jones and Tomboy with Michelle Rodriguez will be released in the fall of 2016. She spent 2004 and 2005 researching autism in order to play the role of Linda in Snow Cake opposite Alan Rickman.

Weaver has been the Honorary Chair for the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund for the last thirty years. She served on the Board of Human Rights First for twenty-five years, and she is currently a board member of the New York Botanical Garden. Weaver was proud to receive the Rachel Carson Award in 2009 for her environmental work. She is also a co-founder of the Flea Theater in Lower Manhattan, which champions young artists and new work.

David Amaral is currently a UC Davis Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience and the Beneto Foundation chair and founding research director of the M.I.N.D. Institute. He was educated at Northwestern University, the University of Rochester (where he received a joint PhD in Psychology and Neurobiology) and Washington University. He spent thirteen years at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. He coordinates a comprehensive, multidisciplinary analysis of children with autism called the Autism Phenome Project to define different types of autism. He is the Director of Autism BrainNet, sponsored by the Simons Foundation and Autism Speaks, that solicits postmortem brain tissue to facilitate autism research. In April of 2015 Amaral became editor-in-chief of Autism Research, the journal of the International Society for Autism Research.

Sigourney Weaver + David Amaral is presented in partnership with the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives.

Brainwave is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.