Katese Odile Gakire is a Rwandan playwright, actor director and humanitarian. An international award-winner, Odile, as she describes herself, is a professional dreamer and a woman of firsts. She is the founding director of both the Rwanda Professional Dreamers and of Ingoma Nshya (Women Initiatives). In 2009, she launched 'The Book of Life,' a multi-component initiative, as a way of helping her country heal from the 1994 genocide. Expanding into realms of publishing, film, radio and theatre, the project has at its core a collection of letters written to the dead. Odile has spent the last years soliciting letters from both survivors and perpetrators of the genocide, and increasingly, from people around the world - the idea being that memories of trauma need to be actively brought into an affirmative realm through an act of imagination. Gakire Odile is a Fellow of Salzburg Global Session 479 Instrumental Value: The Transformative Power of Music.