Presenters

Apurva leads The Rebus Foundation and brings a tireless determination for systemic change in education at Rebus and through collaborative partnerships. She helps educational institutions build human capacity in OER publishing through professional development offerings such as the Textbook Success Program. Apurva studied literature and marketing at McGill University and completed the Master of Publishing program at Simon Fraser University. Her experience ranges across academic publishing, media, social justice, and volunteerism. In 2020, Apurva received an Open Education Award for Excellence from Open Education Global in recognition of her contributions to the field. She strongly believes in translating knowledge among communities and regions, and in the value of greater critical thinking for all.

Ed has been working in the Educational Technology field since 2013. His current position is at SUNY Oneonta, where he work with faculty on the development of online, hybrid, and face-to-face courses. Some of his interests include scaffolding digital competencies across the curriculum, and the exploration, adoption, and creation of high-quality open resources. He is one of the co-founders of the SUNY Create initiative that invites students to build a web presence using open-source tools.

Founder of Equalify, an open-source accessibility platform, Blake also leads Decubing, a web consulting firm specializing in managing web accessibility for Tulane University and other Higher Ed organizations. When he is not making the internet more accessible, Blake performs with The Electric Monks, an AI theater group.

Susan Blair has been with the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture as a Web Development Specialist since November 2017.  She supports several academic departments with their website needs as well as ensuring that the Institute of Agriculture's websites conform to accessibility guidelines.  She assisted with the migration of over 200 websites from SharePoint to WordPress.

A life-long learner, Susan has been drawn to technology for as long as she remembers and is passionate about accessibility as a result of her disability.  She is currently working towards a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer & Information Technology from Austin Peay State University.

When she's not working or studying, Susan can be found spending time with her family, traveling, cross-stitching, bowling or cheering on her favorite sport teams!

Managing Director at Little Forest - a compliant and inclusive web accessibility software for universities.

As a Senior Inclusive Designer at Microsoft, Anna specializes in building inclusive products, focusing on accessibility and inclusion for Azure and beyond. She has over ten years of experience in digital product design and earned an MS in Creative Technology + Design from the University of Colorado Boulder College of Engineering and Applied Science.

Nick is a Developer Relations Advocate at Automattic, where he contributes full-time to the WordPress open-source project. He has over ten years of experience in the WordPress community and was a member of the release team for WordPress 6.0, 6.1, and 6.2. Passionate about the Gutenberg project and “modern” WordPress development, Nick splits his time between creating educational content, crafting experimental plugins and themes, and advocating for both developers and end-users.

Meredith Fierro joined the Reclaim Hosting team in 2017, as Reclaim’s first dedicated Customer Support Specialist. During her time in this role, she’s worked with customers to solve any problems within web hosting while taking the time to teach users, coordinating with internal teams on day-to-day operations, and onboarding new employees as Reclaim continues to grow! Meredith enjoys playing video games, building LEGOs, 3D Printing, and spending as much time outdoors with her fiancé and their Corgi, Dexter!

Michelle Frechette is the Director of Community Engagement for StellarWP at Liquid Web.

Michelle was called "The busiest woman in WordPress." by Matt Mullenweg at WCUS 2022.

In addition to her work at StellarWP, Michelle is the Podcast Barista at WPCoffeeTalk.com, cofounder of underrepresentedintech.com, creator of wpcareerpages.com, the president of the board for BigOrangeHeart.org, Director of Community Relations and contributor at PostStatus.com, co-host of the WPMotivate podcast, author, business coach, and a frequent organizer and speaker at WordPress events. Michelle lives outside of Rochester, NY where she’s an avid nature photographer. You can learn more about Michelle at meetmichelle.online.

Charles Fulton is a web developer at Lafayette College and a frequent train rider. He has worked in higher education web development for over a decade. At Lafayette, he helps manage the web infrastructure, broadly defined. He architected Lafayette’s continuous integration and delivery environment, based on GitLab and Docker, and recently finished moving its WordPress platforms to Amazon Web Services. Charles maintains over a dozen WordPress and Moodle plugins. He serves on the Steering Committee for the Collaborative Liberal Arts Moodle Project (CLAMP) and helps maintain CLAMP's Liberal Arts Edition distribution. In his spare time, he builds model railroads and reviews B-movies.

Developer Relations Engineer at Platform.sh. Former Programmer/Analyst-Principal at the University of Missouri. Web application security and accessibility evangelist. Software instructor. Conference lecturer and presenter. Runs on passion and coffee. Outside of work, you'll find Gilzow mountain biking, snowboarding, enjoying live music with his kids, and dancing wherever the mood strikes.

Steve Graboski is a full-stack developer for Monmouth University’s Marketing & Communications department. A professional programmer with more than a decade of WordPress experience, Steve’s coding interests center around modern JavaScript and React.

Jim Groom, formerly Executive Director of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies at the University of Mary Washington, has been working towards the idea of Domain of One‘s Own as far back as 2008 and has been dreaming of this opportunity for years. In the Spring of 2011 he opened up a digital storytelling course called “ds106” for anyone to take openly online and hundreds of people participated and continue to give back to that community. In Spring of 2013 he joined a group of hackers and thinkers at MIT to think about how an online framework could allow people to seamlessly syndicate the work they do across the web in a space of their own both on an academic and personal level. In Fall of 2015 he went full time with Reclaim Hosting and has not looked back since. #4life

Drake Gómez is an artist and educator, currently holding a Senior Faculty Appointment as Professor in the Digital Media Program at Keystone College in La Plume, Pennsylvania. His paintings and drawings have been shown in exhibitions throughout the US, in group and one-person shows.
As an educator whose courses have transitioned from the traditional fine arts to digital media and design, Professor Gómez’s interests have increasingly focused on teaching web design, WordPress, and drawing for designers.
Professor Gómez holds a BFA in studio art from the University of Central Florida, and an MFA in painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan.

Joni Halabi is a “middle-end” web developer at Georgetown University who likes to write code, commit often, and make up her own titles. She has spent the last 20 years developing solutions for a wide variety of industries and organizations. She currently specializes in developing CMS themes and WordPress editor customizations. Joni has also taught continuing education coding classes and spoken at a number of technical conferences.

When Joni is not writing code, she is writing technical articles and creative works focusing on life as a single mother by choice. She enjoys running, practicing yoga, reading, and seeing live music near her home in the Washington, D.C. area.

Lauren Hanks joined Reclaim Hosting in 2015 as the company’s first hire and has been along for the ride ever since. Now as Director of Operations, Lauren oversees internal teams, daily operations, and general project management for the company. Lauren’s true passion is working closely with educators around the world to bring flexible web space to the classroom.

Amber Hinds is the CEO of Equalize Digital, Inc., a Certified B Corp specializing in WordPress accessibility, maker of the Accessibility Checker plugin, lead organizer of the WordPress Accessibility Meetup, and co-lead organizer of the WordPress Accessibility Day conference. Through her work at Equalize Digital, Amber is striving to create a world where all people have equal access to information and tools on the internet, regardless of ability. Since 2010, she has led teams building websites and web applications for nonprofits, K-12 and higher education institutions, government agencies, and businesses of all sizes, and has become a passionate accessibility advocate.

John leads Princeton University's accessibility testing and remediation efforts, helping ensure the University's designers, developers and writers create sites that are easy to read and easy to adapt to the full range of assistive technologies.

His background in digital publishing has led him towards pushing back against assuming "more training" is always the right structure for an accessibility program: there are so, so many places where changes to editorial tools can make more accessible choices intuitive, self-reinforcing and self correcting. His primary focus towards this in the WordPress world is the author-facing, automatic Editoria11y Accessibility Checker.

By day, David Dashifen Kees (they/them) is a mild-mannered software developer working on Georgetown University's web services team. By night, they're essentially the same thing, except asleep.

Dash has degrees in computer science, education, and divinity that they leverage to treat their technical career as something more like a service opportunity, an outlook that has served them well in their 20+ year career at various universities.  Involved with WordPress since version 3.0 (when the multi-site capabilities were merged into core), Dash's focus has been on plugin development for most of their career, and they've considered it their quest to make it possible to utilize WordPress in a modern, object-oriented way that is very different from the way many WordPress developers do their work.

Recently, their work at Georgetown University has included a lot of process scripting, what some folks call DevOps or WebOps.  They're for the Alliance, use two spaces after a period, and you can pry the Oxford comma from their cold, dead hands.

A regular speaker in higher ed and WordPress communities, Shelley brings a multi-decade career in product design, content strategy,  web governance, and a passion for all things user-experience (can you tell she spent a huge chunk of time as an army-of-one?) to her digital strategy practice. She's currently leading the interdisciplinary digital experience team in the SC Johnson College of Business at Cornell University where all her brand, training, and technical worlds have collided in a spectacular explosion of multi-year projects with huge scope. She'll probably be at the bar if you need her.

Helen is a self-proclaimed challenge-chaser. Her workday is never dull as an Instructional Designer designing online courses, creating customized training programs, and playing with multimedia tools. One of the things she loves about her work is overcoming new challenges when working on projects. With an awesome team to lean on, she is able to come up with creative ways to problem solve and learn from each experience!
She completed her MA in Instructional Technology & Media from Columbia University Teachers College and is proud of her multicultural roots as a Taiwanese-Canadian.

Melanie has worked in ed tech in both private and public sector settings since completing her MA in EdTech at Concordia University (2004). Her projects have ranged from designing open educational resources (OER) to the use of emerging technologies for elearning. She has led a number of award-winning projects that have shifted her Institution’s approach to innovative programming in Justice and Public Safety. Melanie was responsible for some of JIBC’s first open projects and championed the use of WordPress to develop OER.

James Nicnick is a web developer at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. Having spent the majority of his 16 year career in marketing developing and managing client websites and applications, he made the transition to higher education in February of 2022. He currently focuses on the College’s WordPress properties developing custom functionality within their themes and plugins, assisting faculty, students, and staff with their web content needs, and ensuring that the various WordPress deployments are functional and up-to-date.

Nick Novak has been working with the web since High School. Writing HTML for friend's Myspace pages in exchange for vending machine snacks. He has worked with WordPress since 2010 and has over 8 years of higher education experience. Currently, he is the Web Product Lead for the University of Michigan College of Engineering's Communications & Marketing.

He lives just outside of Ann Arbor Michigan with his wife, daughter, and rescue terrier. When you can't find him working in code, he's typically getting his hands dusty in his woodworking shop.

Tom is the Team Lead of the University of Maine System’s Web Technologies team, which manages the technical end of enterprise WordPress sites for the System's many campuses. He has been using WordPress since around version 2.9 and has worked in the University of Maine System for way longer than that. In addition to many years in web work, he also has experience in server administration, networking, and performing live music in questionable establishments.

I am the Director of Web Systems at Excelsior University, a non-profit institution of higher education serving adult learners. A suitable epitaph (or Linkedin intro) would be: “He was a solver of vexing systemic problems, translator of confusing technical issues, builder of successful cross-functional teams, innovator of enterprise open source solutions, and reducer of big budgets.”

Bonnie J. Russell (MLIS, Wayne State University) is the Project Manager for MESH Research and Humanities Commons, and Digital Specialist for HuMetricsHSS at Michigan State University. She has extensive experience in technical project management, user experience, quality assurance testing, technical documentation and training, and metadata management.

Ms. Russell has been actively working with digital humanities scholars since 2012, helping scholars shape projects and identify technology needs. She served as the 2019-2020 chair of the Digital Publishing Committee for the Association of University Presses, primarily focused on the evaluation of digital publishing platforms and repositories. She’s currently serving a 3-year term on the Michigan State University Academic Specialist Advisory Committee (2022-2025). She loves cats, bats, dinosaurs, and Godzilla.

Pronouns: she/her/hers

Steve Ryan is a WordPress engineer for the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University. His interests include basketball, tennis, chess, and manipulating his two kids into doing their homework. A husband and a father. Immensely proud to be a part of this community.

As a user experience designer and as a speaker, Robin Smail’s mission is to connect people. Whether advocating for accessibility and universal design, helping to shape conferences and communities of practice, or designing applications, Robin’s goal is to collaborate, motivate, and transform. Robin holds a B.S. in Information Sciences & Technology from Penn State, and is an award-winning speaker and passionate user advocate. She can be found online everywhere misbehaving as Robin2go.

Daniel currently works on a team of 6 that supports the state of Maine's public university system websites and intranet portal. He has been steeped in higher education webs, instructional design, and intranets throughout his career. He enjoys complex projects and challenges at work and in his free time gardens, makes music, walks, and plays disc golf.

Rachel Urbanowicz is on the faculty at Keystone College in La Plume, Pennsylvania, as an Assistant Professor in their Communications and Digital Media programs. Prior to her academic career, she spent over 20 years in the corporate sector, working as both an in-house digital designer in larger companies, and as a creative manager/designer/writer in smaller firms.

Rachel’s career path has included designing in Silicon Valley in the during the late 1990s; living and working on the island of Terceira, Azores, Portugal doing web and graphic design for both the U.S. military and for a local outdoor sculpture exhibition; as well as creating myriad websites, emailers, landing pages, trade show graphics, brochures, and more for companies in Chicago and Minneapolis.

In 2015, Rachel became an academic!  In her earlier teaching position at Misericordia University in Dallas, Pennsylvania, she facilitated award-winning student work for local non-profit organizations; designed graphics for, and presented at, Women’s History Month events; and wrote, directed, and helped produce college theatrical productions. At Keystone, Rachel advises the student arts and literary magazine The Plume, and teaches courses in web design, graphic design, speech communication, and professional practices.

Steel Wagstaff (he/him) is the product manager for Pressbooks, a Canadian company making open source book publishing software. Before joining Pressbooks in 2018, he spent most of his adulthood teaching in and supporting others who teach in public universities. He earned a Ph.D. in English Literary and a MLIS from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Steel lives in Eugene, Oregon with his wife, Laurel Bastian, and their elementary-school aged son.

Nathan Wallace, VP of Digital at Yes& Agency, is an experienced advocate for open-source technology. He collaborates with higher-ed institutions to develop and implement their digital strategies, emphasizing the benefits of open-source web technologies.

In his previous roles Nathan oversaw the development and maintenance of websites and related technologies for higher-ed and Government sectors. He has been building WordPress solutions for government and higher-ed sectors for the past 13 years. Nathan believes in making design standards and ADA compliance a priority at his organization and works closely with UX, Design, and Communication teams to make this possible.

Michelle is a UX/UI designer at Pressbooks, a small Canadian company which makes an open source (WordPress-based) book publishing platform. Before joining Pressbooks, she worked as an exhibit designer at the Royal Alberta Museum and an instructor in the Design program at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Canada.

Kathy is the Director of Marketing for KadenceWP and has been working with WordPress for well over a decade. She has both technical and marketing experience and has worked with a number of brands in the WordPress space. She has over 20 years of security experience on various layers of the OSI model. She’s helped organize WordCamp US and WordCamp Phoenix. She currently lives outside of Denton, TX where she can often be found walking doggos or hanging out in horse barns.

Andy Zito is a web developer at Hampshire College, focusing on custom development in a Django + React stack to support the College's highly customized evaluations workflow. When he worked at Lafayette College, he played a significant role in the College's migration from on-premises hosting to AWS cloud hosting, including the migration of multiple WordPress multisites. He also has experience in technologies like Moodle, Drupal, and Ruby on Rails.