This article originally appeared in the summer 2015 Harker Quarterly.

About 70 guests attended Larry Lansburgh’s talk, “Into the Amazon: How One Presentation Changed My Life,” in early April in the Nichols Hall auditorium on the upper school campus. The event was co-sponsored by the Harker Speaker Series, the middle and upper school debate departments, and the business and entrepreneurship department.

Lansburgh, an Academy Award-nominated and Emmy-winning documentarian and author of “The Simple Key to Great Presentations,” told how he ended up in the Amazon.

“It was a presentation – just several people speaking to us in the audience – that led me to a life-and-death struggle in the Amazon rain forest,” he said, noting how the power of a presentation can literally change lives.

Lansburgh received an Emmy for “The Hidden Struggle,” a one-hour PBS documentary on the inspiring achievements of developmentally disabled young adults, and an Academy Award nomination for “Dawn Flight,” a dramatic short, and has also produced documentaries on the indigenous cultures of Alaska and Hawaii.