"Photograffeur" JR is the 2011 TED Prize Winner

If you're not familiar with TED, now's the time. TED, which stands for Technology Entertainment and Design, is a non-profit organization created to spread worthy ideas. The organization hosts a series of incredibly popular talks, an increasingly popular website and an annual prize.

The winner of the TED Prize this year is a formerly anonymous artist known simply as JR. He's part graffiti artist and part photographer and refers to himself as a Photograffeur. He installs gigantic portraits across Paris, Palestine, Israel and other countries around the world in order to influence popular opinion and hopefully change some minds.

In addition to the $100,000 prize that JR will be receiving, he'll be given what TED calls "a wish to change the world." Previous wishes have included the founding of new educational programs, organizations to change how people eat and even an engineering team to help organize and analyze SETI data.