Presenters

As an expert technical architect and full-stack development team lead, Yuriy’s professional career spans more than 15 years. Yuriy has worked with clients & teams all around the world, including start-ups, agencies, universities, government bodies and international corporations. Yuriy has significant experience in not only LAMP development, but also technical architecture, cloud infrastructure, digital strategy, content personalization and e-commerce.

Adam Berkowitz is a web developer for the University of Connecticut’s office of University Communications. In his position there, Adam has taken an active role in the area of web accessibility. Other technical interests of Adam’s include: javascript application development, learning about Docker and containerization, and blogging. A self-taught developer, Adam switched careers from music performance and education to web development in 2016. Outside of work, Adam enjoys spending time with his family.

Web Developer at NC State University, doing WordPress things, putting content in the hands of the people.

Blake Bertuccelli leads digital projects for universities, corporations, motion pictures, non-profits, and governments. A graduate of Tulane University, Blake is also Founder of Decubing Web Services, Co-Owner of The Blue House, Board Member of Shotgun Cinema, and Founder of Lowling Company LLC. Most recently, Blake launched an app, "Shaper," for building code templates.

Donna has taken her years of experience, writing skills and her love of accessibility, and channeled her energies to help clients reach their customers. With a multi-faceted focus on accessibility, project management, and content strategy, she makes it her mission to empower clients to speak effectively to their entire target market.

Donna has her CPACC certification from the International Association of Accessibility Professionals, and leverages that knowledge to help businesses see how accessibility is practical, cost-effective and can be “just what we do.” And, with the entire audience able to take in the content, her passion for the written word helps businesses optimize their content to speak to, not at, their audience (and to search engines too). Donna is a goal-driven, passionate individual who enjoys professional growth by helping others achieve their goals.

Ronnie leads the team behind the CampusPress, Edublogs, and WPMU DEV Hosting services, which power thousands of WordPress sites for higher ed institutions small and large. He got his start on the web doing web accessibility audits at The University of Texas nearly 20 years ago. A former educator, wannabe musician and math nerd, Ronnie lives in Austin, Texas.

Rachel Cherry (She/her) is the Director of WPCampus. She is also a freelance software engineer and consultant with a focus on online accessibility, higher education, Gatsby, and WordPress. With experience in back and front-end web development and digital design, Rachel enjoys helping organizations address their online accessibility barriers and teaching others how to be more inclusive on the web.

Phil Crumm is Vice President, New Client Strategy at 10up, a full-service digital agency, where he guides clients–ranging from startups, to higher education institutions, to the Fortune 500–leverage and adapt technology to solve their challenges.

Rachel specializes in designing editorial systems and processes for higher ed websites. She started from the inside, managing media relations and publications for an in-house marketing team at Virginia Tech. Now she works at interactive design agency NewCity to develop sustainable content strategies for clients that support users’ goals as well as organizational realities.

I'm a WordPress plug-in developer and a web accessibility consultant. I'm part of the Make WordPress Accessible team, the team dedicated to improving accessibility in the WordPress ecosystem. Find me online at Twitter as @joedolson or at Joe Dolson Accessible Web Design

Christine is a Sales Director at CampusPress (sister company to Edublogs and WPMU DEV) that hosts WordPress sites for schools around the world. Prior to this position she worked at James Madison University where she managed their WordPress network and supported faculty in integrating technology within their classrooms.

Ben Dunkle is a professor in the Digital Media Arts program at Canisius College in Buffalo, NY.  He has a professional background as a graphic designer, illustrator, and studio artist. He is a contributor WordPress open source project, and has designed thousands of icons for WordPress, including the Dashicons that we see in the wp-admin. Ben has organized and spoken at numerous WordCamps and runs a monthly WordPress users Meetup group.

I’m a web developer and teacher based out of South Central Virginia in the U.S.A. I currently work at VCU’s ALT Lab. I’ve taught college classes (online, hybrid, and face-to-face) in writing, research, English grammar, and writing pedagogy using WordPress and other digital tools. I taught myself to program because it seemed faster than counting the number of exclamation points in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. In the 1855 version, there are 1227, but it wasn’t really faster.

Joni Halabi is a Senior Web Developer for Georgetown University. She specializes in developing CMS themes and Javascript applications, and has spent the last 20 years building solutions for higher education, e-commerce corporations, non-profit organizations, and technology companies. Joni has a BS in Computer Science and Electronic Media and a MFA in Electronic Arts, both from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Outside of work, Joni is a single mom to an amazing toddler, a long-distance runner, and a lover of live music. Learn more at https://thatdevgirl.com and https://jhalabi.com.

Danielle, senior project manager, is responsible for helping content editors build and maintain their websites and is passionate about developing a communications strategy with site editors. She also loves baking cakes (and eating them, too) and practices vinyasa yoga.

With over four decades of research experience in brain-behavior relationships, Dr. Kohl puts her training (MD and Ph.D.) to work every day as she studies the relationship between the brain and user behavior.

Dr. Kohl earned her Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology, with a specialization in cognitive neuropsychology, from The Johns Hopkins University, and currently teaches user interface and interaction at the University of Baltimore.

Rachel Leggett develops custom web applications for the University of Michigan College of Engineering. She also manages their WordPress multisite environment for administrative units, faculty, labs, centers, and academic departments across the College and has been using WordPress since 2009. In her free time, she loves to knit, sew, and dance.

Francesca is the WordPress Community & Partnerships Manager at SiteGround, one of the largest independent web hosting companies where the quality of service stands above it all.

Francesca is also part of the global WordPress Community Team and co-led the release of WordPress.org 5.3 and 5.4.
One of the things she is most proud of is her blog C+B, which helped many creative female entrepreneurs find their path throughout the years.

As an accomplished educator, community leader, and public speaker, you can find her around the world talking about hosting, WordPress, community, open-source, women in tech, and small businesses.

Nathan works at SMILE, an agency helping educational organisations become more authentic, timely and personalised with a suite of creative services and digital products.

Allie Nimmons is a self-taught WordPress power-user since 2014. She spent 5 years maintaining, troubleshooting, designing, building, and breaking WordPress sites for small business owners. Now, she is proud to be the first Community Manager at WP Buffs. She is mildly obsessed with lists and wants to make the internet approachable and accessible to all through WordPress.

Jessica is the Vice President of Sales for Platform.sh and is responsible for Enterprise sales in the Americas and Asia Pacific. Jessica joined Platform.sh in 2019 with a passion for helping customers' solve business challenges through technology. Prior to Platform.sh, Jessica spent 5 years at Rackspace as a Director of Private Cloud Sales where she helped clients achieve their cloud goals with OpenStack and VMware based private cloud solutions. Jessica started her career in the data center space in Northern Virginia working with various colocation and managed services providers. In her free time, Jessica enjoys spending her time outdoors hiking, camping and stand up paddle boarding around her new home in Bend, OR.

Reid Peifer is a co-owner of Modern Tribe, a ridiculously awesome fully distributed digital agency specializing in enterprise WordPress projects. He’s designed, coded, and managed websites of all imaginable makes and sizes, as well as a thriving premium plugin business (Events Calendar PRO), all on top of WordPress.

From full-scale university redesigns to specialty microsites, Reid has led numerous WordPress initiatives in the education space. In addition to overseeing user experience, digital strategy, and product development projects, he is a giant coffee snob, runs long distances very slowly, is dad to two small humans, and husband to a very nice lady.

Steve is a developer with 13 years of experience building WordPress and Drupal sites. While interning at a theatre company in college, Steve overheard the artistic director say they needed a blog and an online magazine. Steve volunteered to build the sites and WordPress 2.0.4 got the job done. His path was changed and he's been making websites ever since.

As a freelance and agency developer, built sites for a range of clients including The Joffrey Ballet, Foreign Affairs, Marketplace, Public Radio International, and many higher education institutions. You can find patches from Steve all over Drupal core and contributed modules.

Reed is a front-end dev who will happily spend all day engrossed in a bunch of .scss files. They are a stickler about code standards and a major advocate for accessibility. They are also a grad student focused on the intersection of culture and technology, who knits socks and sings in a competitive karaoke league.

Morten is a Senior Staff Instructor at LinkedIn Learning (previously Lynda.com) with 60+ courses published on WordPress, web standards, design, UX, and future technologies. He also teaches Interaction Design at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and contributes to WordPress core and community projects. Morten enjoys playing with his son, reading philosophy and sci-fi, having conversations about the internet and how it shapes our society, and wearing out his shoes on the ballroom dance floor.

John is a Developer Advocate at Pantheon and lives in St. Louis with his wife and clowder of cats. His love for coding stems from his enjoyment in innovating simple solutions for complex challenges.

John has been a web developer since 2007 and fell in love with open source in 2013 when he took a job developing WordPress sites at Washington University in St. Louis. When WordCamp US came to St. Louis in 2019, he volunteered as an organizer. This led to a desire to be more involved in the community, so he took a role at Pantheon as a Developer Advocate. Apart from coding, John enjoys playing board games with friends, trying new food, and spending time reading with a cat curled in his lap.

I'm a Course Media Developer for the Center for Instruction and Research Technology (CIRT) at the University of North Florida. In concert with other CIRT team members, I work with UNF faculty to develop and produce course media (video, audio, websites) while continually evaluating the quality and effectiveness of online media for instructional delivery. I’ve been working in the Instructional Technology field for over 25 years.

I am WordPress engineer for the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University. Although I’m fairly new to developing for higher education, I’m a WordPress enthusiast and have been happily hacking away on various WordPress projects for about 10 years. I’m a husband and a father. I enjoy playing basketball and tennis whenever I can. I’m a big Stephen King fan and my favorite colors are (and forever will be) maroon and gold. #goDevils

Husband, Principal Designer at Salesforce, co-host of TuneDig, tinkerer on Logos Creative. Into music, impactful design, and trying to be awake.

John is an Account Executive on the higher-education team at Pantheon. He lives in SF and can usually be found frolicking the city’s many beautiful parks, bicycling or enjoying the cloudy and cold SF beaches.

John has been with Pantheon for 4 years and through that time has worked and consulted with some of the largest universities in the US including UNC Chapel Hill, University of Georgia and NYU. He’s taken learnings from talking to hundreds of EDU professionals into presentations at AMA Symposium for the Marketing of Higher-Education and of course his day to day interactions and consultations with developers, marketing and IT EDU professionals.

If you’re interested in learning more about how Pantheon can help your institution, feel free to reach out to John at john@pantheon.io.

Gian Wild is the CEO of AccessibilityOz, with offices in the United States, Europe and Australia. She has worked in accessibility industry since 1998, when she worked on the very first Australian accessible web site. Her major achievements include: six years’ active membership in the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group contributing to WCAG2; her speech on the importance of web accessibility at the United Nations Conference of State Parties in 2015; and the release of the ICT Mobile Site Accessibility Testing Guidelines as the Mobile Sub-Committee Chair of the ICT Accessibility Testing Symposium. Gian speaks at conferences in Australia, US, Canada, South America and Europe.

Kenzie works at the British Columbia Institute of Technology, as a Systems Analyst, Web Developer, Docs Wrangler, and Community Manager. Kenzie has a passion for communication, continuous iterative improvement, and for systemic solutions to systemic problems. Kenzie has previously spoken at PSEWeb, BCNET, Write the Docs, the International Conference on Communication & Media Studies, the Association of Internet Research Conference, Bifrost Conference for Leaders in Tech, DevOpsDays events in various countries, and STC InterChange, and completed a Master's degree in Professional Communication by writing their thesis on prosocial community within Minecraft multiplayer servers.

Kenzie is awesome and you totally want to be their friend (offer of friendship void where local laws do not permit, not guaranteed in all circumstances, skill-testing questions required).

Tim has been building and designing for the Web since 2004 when he got my first job creating sites for a small community college in Virginia. Since then he's led great teams at companies like: 10up, Fresh Tilled Soil, Boston University, University of Southern California, and NC State.

His writing has been featured on sites such as: A List Apart, Smashing Magazine, InformIT, and SitePoint. On topics ranging from basic UX to advanced JavaScript APIs. In 2012 he also wrote his first book called, Learning JavaScript with Pearson Education.

Andres ensures progress through communication-based on connection, understanding, and clarity. He has actively led interactive projects for clients such as The Johns Hopkins University, Cornell University, the University of Maryland, Colgate University.

In addition to leading idfive, Andres teaches User Experience and Interaction Design for the Maryland Institute College of Art’s Graphic Design MFA program.

Andres was a recipient of the American Marketing Association’s “4 Under 40 Emerging Leaders” award, has an MBA from Johns Hopkins and is pursuing a Doctorate in Information and Interaction Design.