Michael Mendizza
Filmmaker, Founder of Touch the Future

Prompted by the attempted rape and murder of a female colleague in 1981, Michael embarked on The Betrayal of Intimacy, an independent research and public awareness project to prevent sexual violence. The sociopath, rapist, and abusive male are most often themselves victims of early childhood abuse, humiliation, and neglect. It is this betrayal of intimacy that creates a foundation for violence. If the absence of nurturing is a major contributor to juvenal and adult patterns of violence, then feeling safe, physical affection and play in early childhood will help prevent violence. In 1987 Michael founded Touch the Future, a nonprofit learning design center, upon this simple observation.

As documentary filmmaker Michael has traveled extensively researching sensitive issues: domestic violence and rape, the impact of media on learning, cultural and human development, the nature of intelligence, holistic learning models, the changing family, prenatal learning, creativity and peak performance. For two decades Michael has gathered and published interviews with more than fifty researchers, scientists, authors and performance specialists, including extensive works with renowned physicist David Bohm, J. Krishnamurti, Ashley Montagu and Joseph Chilton Pearce. Working closely with Pearce and performance specialists, Michael developed a revolutionary parenting and coaching model that applies the psychology of optimum experience, what athletes call The Zone, to parenting and to education. A new book, Magical Parent - Magical Child, the Optimum Learning Relationship, offers this model of peak performance and optimum learning to parents, preschool, Head Start, and child care providers, public educators and amateur athletic coaches. Michael has presented these and related works at national and international conferences in the United States, Eastern Europe, The Netherlands, in India and the United Kingdom.