Our fantastic speaker lineup for WordCamp Detroit 2018!
Tessa Kriesel
Developer Advocate at Pantheon, Tessa has been a web developer for over 10 years. She enjoys front-end development but also loves to build sites from start to finish.
She enjoys teaching others to code, mentoring junior developers and speaking at conferences and youth events. She is an instructor and retired Chapter Leader for Girl Develop It Minneapolis, WordCamp Minneapolis Organizer and founder of Outspoken Women. Tessa is a northern Minnesota native, but now lives in the Twin Cities. She loves dogs and enjoys helping local organizations rescue dogs in her free time.
Jeannette Washington M.Ed.
Jeannette is an educator with nearly a decade of experience working with students that exhibit exceptionalities. Her expertise in the field of dyslexia has been solicited for articles in The Washington Post, GraduateSchool.org, and AccreditedSchoolsOnline.com to name a few. She is an active member of the International Dyslexia Association and has spoken at the Mississippi Dyslexia Symposium and the International Literacy Association Conference in Maryland. Currently, Jeannette works with Microsoft Philanthropies teaching high school students how to code.
Kellen Mace
Kellen is a Lead Backend Developer at WebDevStudios, where he leads teams of developers and builds WordPress powered sites for enterprise clients. He lives in Rochester Hills, Michigan with his wife and two young sons and is very excited that WordCamp Detroit is back!
Katy Hinz
Katy Hinz is a UX/UI designer with a passion for solving user problems through intentional layout and beautiful visual design. With over 15 years in the industry, Katy’s broad experience spans from user experience strategy, to creative team leadership, to hands-on UX and web design. She loves to have her hands in many things at once to keep her creativity sparked, and finds energy in sharing great ideas with fellow design nerds.
Aisha Blake
Aisha Blake arrived in Detroit in 2013 to serve as a Jesuit Volunteer and ended up on the leadership team for Detroit Speakers in Tech and Girl Develop It Detroit. This inevitably led to a deep love of the tech community in Detroit and a desire to put down roots. She has since become the owner of a cat and a house. Aisha has taught web development to people of all ages in bootcamps, workshops, and online courses. She currently works as a developer for Detroit Labs. She is down for anything as long as there are puppies and/or karaoke involved.
Novella Chiechi
Novella is a freelance web developer working with JS and Drupal, and a co-leader of the Detroit Speakers in Tech meetup.
Philip Salatrik
After a long career in entertainment Phil has recently evolved into a web developer. By blending several years of content management with a coding bootcamp at Grand Circus and online tech classes, Phil has entered into the tech industry as a versatile full-stack WordPress developer.
Ross Johnson
Ross is the founder of the design agency 3.7 DESIGNS and premium plugin company SnapOrbital. An eighteen year veteran of the field and part time faculty of Michigan State University, he provides a holistic view of business, design and development.
Kyle Maurer
Kyle works at Sandhills Development on Easy Digital Downloads which is a WordPress plugin that makes selling digital products ridiculously simple. He’s a native of Jackson, Michigan, co-hosts the Get Options podcast, and helps organize meetups and WordCamps in the region while brewing fine beer and playing guitar as often as possible.
Hajj Flemings
Hajj Flemings was one of eight entrepreneurs selected for the CNN’s Black in America 4 The New Promised Land: Silicon Valley documentary with Soledad O’Brien. During the filming of that documentary, he recognized that a lack of access in the technology space was creating a permanent underclass in communities of color. This propelled him to launch Rebrand Cities a global civic design partnership with WordPress with the audacious goal to get 10,000 businesses online and eradicate the digital divide.
Kim Kachadoorian
Kim is a geeky marketing type with a background in marketing, data, project management, and teaching. She is currently looking for a new full time gig but in the mean time she is an instructor at Washtenaw Community College teaching business and entrepreneurship classes. She enjoys working on WordPress when she gets the time and has a passion for IP law, hence her topic.
Adam Stogdill
Adam is a developer of 20+ years ranging from web development all the way to AR/VR. He loves WordPress and uses it on the majority of his web projects for it’s ease of use for clients as well as it’s power under the hood.
Amit Rathi
Tech enthusiast, enjoys tinkering with electronics, attending meetups, and sharing great memes.
Anthony Montalbano
I’m a cofounder of AMBR Detroit where we professionally build WordPress sites for clients. We build custom plugins and themes. I also helped co-organized WordCamp Detroit 2010-2012.
Emerson Jeffries
Emerson Jeffries is a 14 year old web and graphic designer. While owning his own WordPress based business, he also juggles school, being a young artist in Mosaic’s performing art’s program and coming home every day to 5 siblings, 4 of which are younger than him.
With all this daily activity, Emerson still manages to deliver aesthetically pleasing results to clients that show a drastic growth in the number of sales and customers those businesses receive. His firm, Emerson DSign, Inc. has serviced over 50 small businesses and individuals and is still looking to provide more people with digital solutions that have been proven to establish and replenish brands across Metro Detroit and abroad.
Birgit Pauli-Haack
Since 1998 Birgit Pauli-Haack has worked with nonprofits as a web developer, a technology strategist, a trainer and community organizer. She founded Pauli Systems, LC in 2002, now a team of six. It is a 100% distributed company. Since 2010, her team has used WordPress to build new nonprofit sites and applications.
In her spare time Birgit serves as deputy with the WordPress Global Community team, as a WordPress Meetup organizer and a Tech4Good organizer. She has been a Regional Netsquared Ambassador since 2015. In the same year, Birgit co-founded with like minded technology strategist the nonprofit organization NPTechProjects, Inc., helping nonprofits use technology to increase their impact. Alongside Jim O’Reilley, she co-hosts the podcast “What’s New in NPTech.”
Birgit is a native German. When not in front of a computer, she runs, plays tennis, or hangs out with friends. She and her husband of 25 year love to travel and visit city art museums.
Kim Kaiser
A developer working from the user’s perspective, Kim has a varied career delivering information and content of all types to a global audience. Her first program was written on punch tape and she hasn’t stopped learning new programming languages throughout her career in engineering and information technology. Kim has a B.S. in Chemical Engineering and a B.S. in Chemistry from Purdue University and has worked for several Fortune 500 companies. She has been creating websites since Al Gore invented the Internet and now works for small to medium sized companies, doing a lot of WordPress integrations.
RJ Mey
Web developer at American Expedition Vehicles. Cat aficionado.
Allison Tarr
Allison Tarr is a feminist, introvert, and front-end developer who openly discusses her struggles with mental health. She loves guacamole, hula hoops, & Dolly Parton (not necessarily in that order). As a result of her own lived experience combating stigma, Allison encourages a more open conversation to provide additional resources to create safe and sustainable spaces.
Now working as an independent developer, she has been able to consciously choose better health while advocating for change in how the tech industry approaches mental health and burnout.
Al Davis
I have been working with WordPress before it was even known as WordPress. Working in the hosting industry has given me plenty of exposure to all aspects of WordPress. When not working, I can usually be found watching NFL Football and playing darts.
Matthew Perkins
I’m the marketing director for Build/Create Studios in Ann Arbor. I manage the marketing for our own website as well as our client’s inbound marketing and SEO campaigns.
Brian Richards
Brian Richards, the creator of WPSessions.com, has been developing with WordPress since 2007 and training and leading development teams since 2011. In addition to investing his time into training, Brian has had the opportunity to work with many amazing WordPress agencies and experts over these last several years. This has allowed him to help develop sites for Microsoft, Disney, TIME, YMCA, and numerous others. Brian has an affinity for self-directed learning and helping others to develop skills and workflows to better solve important and complicated problems. He can’t resist helping good people do great things!
Tina Todorovic
Tina is the co-founder of Social Web Suite, an all-in-one social media platform deeply integrated with WordPress. Besides volunteering and co-organizing Toronto WordPress meetups and WordCamps (2014, 2015 and 2016), Tina enjoys meeting new fellow WordPressers and spreading the word about WordPress.
Tina was in the Women in WordPress panel at WordCamp Ottawa 2017 and Niagara WordPress meetup on February 21st, 2018.
In her spare time, she wanders around Canada’s beautiful countryside, tries out all the different cuisines that Toronto has to offer and attends various conferences and
events.
Seth Alling
Seth Alling is a Detroit-based developer turned designer turned developer, who has been working with WordPress since 2009 and currently works as a Publishing Engineer for Mediavine. When he’s not developing (or designing), you can find him running, playing soccer, or spending time with his wife and 3 kids.
Speakers subject to change.